Korpi: Developing a User-Friendly and Useful Frontend for a Corpus Search Engine

Abstract

Corpora are vast collections of texts that allow linguists to study how languages are used and how they change. The Language Bank of Sweden (Språkbanken) houses and provides access to corpora via Korp, a research platform for analysing texts. This thesis discusses the development and evaluation of a more user-friendly frontend for Korp named Korpi. It aims to address three issues with Korp: its slow speed when searching across large corpora, an interface which is not suited for mobile devices, and complex functionality that may not be needed for the general public.

Korpi was developed in an iterative manner with features being implemented and evaluated throughout the project. Key elements of the user experience were identified and strategies to ensure a responsive design were utilized. A mobile-first approach was adopted ensuring that Korpi was suited to mobile devices.

Korpi was evaluated by two different focus groups divided by age. Various aspects of Korpi, as well as Korp, were evaluated. These related to the user-friendliness and usefulness of the two applications. Questionnaires were used to quantify the results on a scale from 1 to 5 for each of the evaluation aspects.

Findings from the focus groups show that Korpi is a user-friendly application that can be considered useful. The design and streamlined implementation of search engine features were appreciated. Korpi was seen as a better option for first-time users wanting an introduction to linguistics as opposed to Korp.