WordSmith

WordSmith

 

Software for finding patterns in text. Used world-wide by language students, teachers, researchers and investigators working in such fields as linguistics, literature, law, medicine, history, politics, sociology.

 

Can handle most languages including Chinese, Japanese, etc..

 

WordSmith Tools is a download product for the PC. For use on Mac or Linux systems only with a suitable Windows emulator. Requires Windows XP or later.

 

 

What's new in this version?

 

WordSmith is organic software!

Version 1.0 was launched in 1996. We have continued an organic policy of growth ever since ... now in 2019 we are at version 7.0 with improvements and new features.

 

New features:

•Multi-word unit conversion

•Plot contexts

•Concord files processed list (automatic or manual)

•Add a Set column

•Export KeyWords database data  

•TED talks video conversion

•Enhanced key word statistics and key word display

•Part of speech tag filtering

•Multiple statistics in collocation display

•Dispersion statistic for word lists

•Lemma file building

•Mis-matched tag finder

•Boilerplate text finding

•Duplicate and near-duplicate text file finding

•Relevance filter

•Highlighter

•BIC scores for key items

•Corpus sampler

•choice for percentage columns

•improved colours

•high definition screen focus

•Text Converter case change

•Text Converter remove words

•Relative entropy

•Associates follow-up

•Chargram patterns

•Part of speech renaming

•Conditional Probability statistics

•Build sub-corpora

•Clusters in single-word word list

•TMX file handling

•Copy search-word to Set column

•File count facility

•RTF Sample

•Normalised counts

•Text dispersion keyness

 

Controller

 

This program controls the Tools. It is the one which shows and alters current defaults, handles the choosing of text files, and calls up the different Tools.

It will appear at the top left corner of your screen.

You can minimize it, if you feel the screen is getting cluttered.

 

Concord

Concord is a program which makes a concordance using plain text or web text files.

To use it you will specify a search word, which Concord will seek in all the text files you have chosen. It will then present a concordance display, and give you access to information about collocates of the search word.

Listings can be saved for later use, edited, printed, copied to your word-processor, or saved as text files.

 

Keywords

The purpose of this program is to locate and identify key words in a given text. To do so, it compares the words in the text with a reference set of words usually taken from a large corpus of text. Any word which is found to be outstanding in its frequency in the text is considered "key". The key words are presented in order of outstandingness.

 

The distribution of the key words can be plotted.

 

Listings can be saved for later use, edited, printed, copied to your word-processor, or saved as text files.

 

This program needs access to 2 or more word lists, which must be created first, using the Word List program.

 

WordList

WordList generates word lists based on one or more plain text or web text files. Word lists are shown both in alphabetical and frequency order. They can be saved for later use, edited, printed, copied to your word-processor, or saved as text files.

 

Utilities

Aligner is a tool which enables you to produce a copy of a text file with numbered sentences or paragraphs and then align two or more versions of a text, showing alternate paragraphs or sentences of each.

 

Character Profiler

A tool to help find out which characters or chargrams are most frequent in a text or a set of texts.

The purpose could be to check out which characters or character sequences are most frequent (e.g. in normal English text the letter E followed by T will be most frequent, THE and ARE will be high frequency 3-chargrams), or it could be to check whether your text collection contains any oddities, such as accented characters or curly apostrophes you weren't expecting.

 

CharGrams

A tool to help find out which chargrams (sequences of characters) are most frequent in a text or a set of texts.

 

The purpose could be to check out which chargrams are most frequent e.g. in word-initial position, in the middle of a word, or at the end.

 

Choose Languages

A tool for selecting Languages which you want to process.

You will probably only need to do this once, when you first use WordSmith Tools.

 

 Corpus Checker

A tool to go through your corpus and seek out any text files which may have become corrupted. Works in any language. Also, tests for boilerplate text, file-duplication, relevance

 

File Utilities

Utilities to

•compare two files

•cut large files into chunks

•find duplicate files

•rename multiple files

•split large files into their component texts

•join up a lot of small text files into merged text files

•find holes in your text files

 

 File Viewer

A tool for viewing how your text files are formatted in great detail, character by character.

 Minimal Pairs

A program to find typos and minimally-differing pairs of words.

 

Text Converter 

Text Converter is a general-purpose utility which you use for three main tasks: to edit your texts, to rename text files, to change file attributes, to move files into a new folder if they contain certain words or phrases.

The main use is to replace strings in text files. It does a "search and replace" much as in word-processors, but it can do this on lots of text files, one after the other. As it does so, it can also replace any number of strings, not just one.

 

It is very useful for going through large numbers of texts and re-formatting them as you prefer, e.g. taking out unnecessary spaces, ensuring only paragraphs have at their ends, changing accented characters.

 

Version Checker

A tool to check whether any components of your current version need updating and if so, download them for you. Accessed via the main Controller menu, File | Web version check.

 

When you run the program you'll see something like this:

 

 

The various components of WordSmith are listed in the top window and the current version is compared with your present situation. If they are different, all the files in the relevant zip file will be starred (*) in the left margin.

 

By default you will download to wherever WordSmith is already (the program in a program folder and settings etc. in a Documents folder) but you're free to choose somewhere else. Press Download if you wish to get the updated files.

 

After the download, the various .zip files are checked (bottom right window) if downloaded successfully, and the Install button is now available for use. Install unzips all those which are checked.

 WSConcGram

A tool for generating concgrams.