Search for Words That Don't Exist in a Translation?

[Brett K.]

I've created a search to find all of the possible contractions a translation may use. I want to get a total count of contractions used in each translation. But not every translation contains all of the contractions. Some only contain a few.

When I perform the search, if a particular contraction does not appear in the translation, it won't perform the search. I have to delete that contraction from the search string.

Is there any way to get Accordance to search for all of the possible contractions in this string while ignoring the ones that don't appear in that translation? That way I don't have to whittle the string down to just the contractions that do appear in that particular translation.

Here's the search string I'm using:

 

 

=*'d <OR> =*'ll <OR> =*'m <OR> =*n't <OR> =*'re <OR> =*'ve <OR> =*he's <OR> how's <OR> that's <OR> this's <OR> there's <OR> what's <OR> when's <OR> where's <OR> who's <OR> why's

Thanks

[Brett K.]

I guess the answer is "No".

[Joel Brown]

This actually works in the Research, due to not being familiar with the varying vocabulary of each text or tool.  I was able to search for either (foobar, moses) or foobar moses, and both worked even though no translation uses foobar.

 

Is your search not working for you?

[Brett K.]

I've attached a screen shot of what I get when I attempt to run my contraction search in a research window. Many of those contractions are contained in some translations. It returns nothing.

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Brett, that screenshot is a standard workspace I think, not a research window. Paste your string in the research entry bard top right of the workspace and make sure it's set to all texts and you should get a result. If you just want to search one text, make a group that includes that text only and do that (I think that will work)

[Brett K.]

Thanks, but that is in fact a Research window. You can see the group pop-up menu in the upper left. The word "Research" as the window title is beneath the alert message.

However, I tried it from the Research field in the upper right corner as well. Same results.

Here's the string. You guys can try it too.

=*'d <OR> =*'ll <OR> =*'m <OR> =*n't <OR> =*'re <OR> =*'ve <OR> =*he's <OR> how's <OR> that's <OR> this's <OR> there's <OR> what's <OR> when's <OR> where's <OR> who's <OR> why's

--
Accordance 12.1
macOS 10.12.5

Edited June 20, 2017 by Brett K.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hey Brett,

 

  I suspect your search is working and finding nothing. I tried it got pretty much what you got. Try a search for :   .' s

  Note space after apostrophe. And also do as exact. That returned a bunch of hits for me

 

Thx

D

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Playing with this more I think that s is being handled somewhat specially. So for example you can do .' s and it will things like lord's, brother's and so on. But trying that with t doesn't work so .' t does not find don't. *'t finds all words ending in t ignoring ' apparently. Trying *.' t fails as do some other variants. If you look at the drop down quick filter as you type in the search string you see that s is in the list, as though it were a word. t however is not. Searching for .' finds all the contractions but also quotes and such.

 

This works pretty well :  .'@-?

 

Thx

D

Edited June 21, 2017 by דָנִיאֶל

[Ken Simpson]

Thanks, but that is in fact a Research window. You can see the group pop-up menu in the upper left. The word "Research" as the window title is beneath the alert message.

 

However, I tried it from the Research field in the upper right corner as well. Same results.

 

Here's the string. You guys can try it too.

 

=*'d <OR> =*'ll <OR> =*'m <OR> =*n't <OR> =*'re <OR> =*'ve <OR> =*he's <OR> how's <OR> that's <OR> this's <OR> there's <OR> what's <OR> when's <OR> where's <OR> who's <OR> why's

 

--

Accordance 12.1

macOS 10.12.5

 

I stand corrected. You are right! (as of course I should have realised - you are no noob) I suspect the issue may be in the '  and how it's a string delimeter. But I am not one of the programmers, Joel will need to weigh in on that.

Sorry for the "bum steer".

[Brett K.]

Playing with this more I think that s is being handled somewhat specially. So for example you can do .' s and it will things like lord's, brother's and so on. But trying that with t doesn't work so .' t does not find don't. *'t finds all words ending in t ignoring ' apparently. Trying *.' t fails as do some other variants. If you look at the drop down quick filter as you type in the search string you see that s is in the list, as though it were a word. t however is not. Searching for .' finds all the contractions but also quotes and such.

 

This works pretty well :  .'@-?

 

Thx

D

Thank for the time, but my contraction search does work. If you search in a text that contains all of those contractions, it will return results. That's the entire problem. Even though I'm using <OR>, Accordance is requiring that the search term exists at least once in the text.

 

Just take the first search term like =*'d and search in the Message. You'll get hits.

 

But if you do the entire search in a translation that does not contain *ALL* of the terms, it won't even perform the search. You have to manually eliminate each term that translation does not contain.

 

If you do it in a Research window, it will return no results even though the individual terms do appear in some translations.

 

That's the problem. The search syntax is correct.

 

Thanks

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Precisely - if a text you search contains all of them it works. This is standard Accordance search behaviour - if it isn't present in the word indexes you cannot run the search.  Now in a Research tab searches for words with OR does work for missing words. But ....

 

Wildcards should work but because of what appears to be special treatment of ' it doesn't work generally, though 's appears to have been special cased but then it works like two separate words. This behavior of not running a search if a term in an OR doesn't exist (which is rather counter to how you would intuitively think about OR) has been raised before in several different contexts. It can for example interfere with searches which are automated through scripting if you are not careful what you run.

 

My search on the other hand works whether all are represented or not and in the research tab. At least it seems to find all contractions where ' are present which I think was your original goal.

 

Thx

D

Edited June 21, 2017 by דָנִיאֶל

[Brett K.]

Precisely - if a text you search contains all of them it works. This is standard Accordance search behaviour - if it isn't present in the word indexes you cannot run the search.  Now in a Research tab searches for words with OR does work for missing words. But ....

 

Wildcards should work but because of what appears to be special treatment of ' it doesn't work generally, though 's appears to have been special cased but then it works like two separate words. This behavior of not running a search if a term in an OR doesn't exist (which is rather counter to how you would intuitively think about OR) has been raised before in several different contexts. It can for example interfere with searches which are automated through scripting if you are not careful what you run.

 

My search on the other hand works whether all are represented or not and in the research tab. At least it seems to find all contractions where ' are present which I think was your original goal.

 

Thx

D

So how do you perform this search in Accordance . . . either on a single text that doesn't contain all of the words or in the Research window.

 

As it is, it seems there is no way (or at least no easy way) to do it.

 

The search is pretty simple: find any translation that contains any of these words . . . without me having to already know which translations contain those words.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Open a research tab and select your group containing all English Bibles - you'll have to create one because there isn't one by default. Or you can use All Texts which will include non-English if you have them and you almost certainly will. Then select English search and Exact for the research tab and put in my search string above. It will search all texts. Then if you want to look at one in particular and look at the stats you can do view some of the analytics in the research tab or open on of the texts from the research tab results and that will rerun the search on that text. Then you can look at the Analysis to see all the contractions.

 

Sorry slight delay - had to kill off my viruscan to get control of disk io, so I could double check something.

 

Thx

D

[Brett K.]

Did you try that with my contraction search string? If not, please do so and tell me the results you get.

Thanks

BTW, I appreciate your time and assistance. I have been using Accordance for over twenty years so I'm pretty familiar with it. You won't need to give detailed instructions on how to accomplish a task.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I tried it with your original search string on the day you posted first and it would not run - got the same error dialog you did. I didn't know how to make it run so I didn't post back until I had more time to look at it and work out an alternative. I just reran it now and noticed that before I get the error dialog saying "These words were not found in any of the texts or tools requested", it does in fact do some processing. My guess is it's searching indexes. But in any case you get no usable result.

 

20 years! well beyond me. I thought you might not need the details but figured it couldn't hurt

 

Thx

D

[Brett K.]

Like I said, I can find no reason why it should not work--at least in the Research tab. It would be nice if it could run in an individual translation without having to know every word that may or may not appear in that translation. It seems like it should work in the Research tab, but it doesn't.

I have no idea why.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Agreed - seems like a bug to me

 

thx

D

[Joel Brown]

Its not a bug, just a limitation.  The filtering of items is designed for known words that can be quickly searched.  This is why (foobar, moses) works, as these are known words that can be checked in the cache for fast searches.  Since your search involves wildcards and word endings, it cannot be cached, and non-cached searches do not filter missing terms at this time.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

And it's answers like that that lead me to use qualifying terms like "seems" rather than being more categorical. There is always more than meets the eye.

Thanx for the explanation. It would be a nice enhancement some time.

 

Thx

D

[Brett K.]

So is there anyway to do it without having to find only the exact contractions that exist within each translation?

I know from experience that whittling down the search terms to just the ones that exist in the translation can be very time consuming. So is there a way to find all of the contractions that appear in each translation without doing separate searches on each translation using only the exact contractions that appear in each translation?

Thanks

BTW: Thank you very much for taking the time to work on this and explain it. I do appreciate it. Maybe I just try to do stuff other people never considered.

[Joel Brown]

I don't believe there is any easy way for you at this time - you'll have to search and collect manually.  What you may want to consider is doing a Research on each contraction, then manually aggregating the hits for each search.