The IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) is a collection of tools for managing and querying large text corpora (100 M words and more) with linguistic annotations. Its central component is the flexible and efficient query processor CQP.

We are currently working towards the first official release of the IMS Open Corpus Workbench, Version 3.0. has not been released officially yet. Until then, you can download a pre-release version of the CWB and some manuals from this temporary page. The official release will be presented on a redesigned and much more informative Web site.

Download pre-release version

IMS Open Corpus Workbench version 2.2.102:

• cwb-2.2.102-osx-10.5-universal.tar.gz (Mac OS X Universal, 4.1 MiB)
• cwb-2.2.102-linux-i386.tar.gz (Linux Intel 32-bit, 6.5 MiB)
• cwb-2.2.102-linux-x86_64.tar.gz (Linux Intel 64-bit, 7.5 MiB)
• cwb-2.2.102-solaris-sparc.tar.gz (Solaris 8 SPARC, 4.1 MiB)
• cwb-2.2.102-source.tar.gz (source code, 1.4 MiB)

Download an appropriate binary package for your computer, then unpack the archive and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file. If you want to compile the source code yourself, download the source package, unpack the archive, and follow the instructions in the README file there. Please check the CWB wiki for further installation tips.

CWB/Perl interface version 2.2.102:

• Perl-CWB-2.2.102.tar.gz (source code, 230 KiB)
• Perl-CWB-CL-2.2.102.tar.gz (source code, 135 KiB)

Unpack the source code archives, then follow the instructions in the respective README file. You have to install the main CWB distribution first, of course. Note that you will also need a suitable C compiler in order to install the CWB-CL package.

Web GUI CQPweb by Andrew Hardie (Lancaster)

• A new official Web GUI for the CWB called CQPweb is currently in development. The latest stable release (version 2.02) can be downloaded from the SourceForge project page.

Documentation:

• Corpus Encoding Tutorial (PDF, 160 KiB)
• CQP Query Language Tutorial (PDF, 320 KiB)

Pre-encoded sample corpora (required for CQP Tutorial):

• Novels by Charles Dickens (DICKENS, 37.5 MiB)
• Collection of German law texts (GERMAN-LAW, 20.9 MiB)

Archive of older versions (most users should not install these):

• Release Candidate 1 (source code, 5 August 2007)

Further information

• Project page at sourceforge.net
• CWB wiki for users & developers
• Online CQP Demos hosted by the University of Osnabrück
• CWB mailing list
• Old homepage of the CWB at the IMS, University of Stuttgart

SVN access

If you prefer to use the cutting edge version of the CWB with the latest bug fixes and features, export the source code directly from its Subversion repository with

• svn export https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/cwb/trunk cwb-3.0 (IMS Open Corpus Workbench)
• svn export https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/perl/trunk/CWB Perl-CWB-3.0 (Perl CWB package)
• svn export https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/perl/trunk/CWB-CL Perl-CWB-CL-3.0 (Perl CWB-CL package)
• svn export https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/gui/cqpweb/trunk CQPweb-2.0 (Web GUI CQPweb)

Go to the newly created directory cwb-3.0/ and follow the build instructions in the INSTALL file. Installation of the CWB/Perl modules and CQPweb works in the same way as for the packaged (pre-)release versions above.

If you want to follow the development of the CWB closely or make your own contributions, check out a “sandbox” copy from the Subversion repository. You can then easily update the source code by typing svn up in the corresponding directory.

• svn co https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/cwb/trunk cwb (IMS Open Corpus Workbench)
• svn co https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/perl/trunk cwb-perl (CWB/Perl interface)
• svn co https://cwb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cwb/gui/cqpweb/trunk cqpweb (Web GUI)

Related links

• CSAR — Corpus Server Architecture
• BNCweb, a Web GUI for the British National Corpus using the CQP query engine