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<Paper uid="W97-1105">
  <Title>A LEXICAL DATABASE TOOL FOR QUANTITATIVE PHONOLOGICAL RESEARCH</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
cONCLUSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper has presen!ed a hypertext lexicon tailored to the practical needs of the phonologist working on large scale data problems. The user accesses the lexicon via a forms interface provided by HTML and a browser. A CGI program processes the query. The user can refine a query during the course of several interactions with the system, finally switching the output to ~TEEX format for direct inclusion of the results in a research paper. An extension to the regular expression notation was used for searching for minimal pairs. Parenthesised subexpressions are interpreted as parameters which control the structuring of search results. These extensions, though intuitively simple, make a lot of expressive power available to the~user. The current prototype system has been used hehvily for substantive phonological fieldwork and analysis on the field, documented in (Bird, 1997). There are a number of ensuing benefits of this approach for phoriological research: (i) it supports a quantitative method rof doing phonological research; (ii) it gives universal access to the same set of informants; (iii) it enables other researchers to hear the original speech data with6ut having to rely on published transcriptions; (iv) it imakes the full power of regular expression search available, and search results are full multimedia documents; and (v) it enables the early i refutation of false hypotheses, shortening the analysis-hypothesis-test loop.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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