The Emu Query Tool

As an alternative to performing queries from the command line, Emu provides a graphical tool which has facilities for constructing utterance lists (subsets of the database) to be used in searches, saving segment lists in text files, and for viewing individual utterances or segments.

The query tool can be started in a number of ways: from the command line as hquery dbasename, from Splus via the emu.query function, or from the toolbar in the Emu labeller. The behaviour of the query tool is slightly different when called from within Splus since the resulting segment list is returned as the result of the function call rather than being saved in a text file.

The basic query tool (as shown above) consists of:

• a button panel which allows selection of utterance lists, saving segment lists and access to on line help

• an entry for the query and a button to start the search

• a panel which displays the resulting segment list

Segment lists can be saved as text files which can later be used by other Emu tools: for example they can be read into Splus or Xlisp-Stat. If the query tool is started from within Splus, there is a single Save&Quit button (in place of the separate Save and Quit buttons) which exits the query tool and returns the segment list to the calling program.

The first thing that you must do when making a query via the query tool is to select the utterance list on which the query will be performed. Each query of the database works on only a subset of the utterances in the database; for example, you might query just the male speakers or just those of a given language. The utterance list editor allows you to build up lists of utterances and save them with comments for further use. The utterance list editor is started when you press the Utterances button in the query tool.