Any way to look up structures?

[Shadowdh]

I think I might have asked this before and will do a quick search to see if anyone else has asked but I was wondering if its possible to search for grammatical structures using pleco? eg 爱（什么）不（什么）。。。 etc... thanks for any info...

 

[mikelove]

Yes, if you insert a ... or a _ it'll search for dictionary entries that contain similar patterns; doesn't work in full-text searches yet, though, just in the few entries in each dictionary that are designed that way.

 

[Shadowdh]

You are the man once again mate... I did look around the forum but all I could find were a few threads from a few years ago... just tried it out and bam... works like a charm... thanks...

 

[stephanhodges]

So, for example, what exactly did you try? I would have thought (without trying) that the example you cited would be too long to search for...

 

[Shadowdh]

I just input 爱... and it came up with a list of options... it does show whats in the dictionary as Mike says... didnt try for full text searches...

 

[gato]

You can also search for 爱 followed by underscore ("爱_") in ShadowH's example.

 

[stephanhodges]

I tried 什么...不 which works up to the 什么... (entries are in the list), but it does not work for wildcard searches.

So, 什么... is another example. Interesting to see which dictionary has the most hits too!

Also, I think there's a bug, in that if I am in wildcard mode (#什么...不 and switch dictionaries, it leaves the "#", but is NOT in wildcard search mode. The wildcard search mode then has to be toggled off (to remove the "#") and then back on.

(Let's see if Mike is reading this thread :twisted: )

 

[gato]

I don't think "什么...不" is a set grammatical structure, which is why your search isn't turning up anything.

But, on the other hand, the wild card search of "$_" doesn't turn up anything, either. Why's that?

 

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - Oh I read every thread, I just try not to get in the way of a nice back-and-forth, or chime in for the sake of chiming in when I don't have anything useful to say.

Now that the issue of a possible bug has come up, however: # is actually "full-text," not wildcard mode, and full-text searches don't yet work with sentence structures - we'd have to add a lot more intelligence to how the full-text system interprets example sentences before we could do that, though it's a neat idea.

gato - I think the problem with $_ is that the software is failing to recognize it as something it can actually search for - not treating _ as a letter or a Chinese character. Not sure how easy this will be to fix but we'll give it a shot.