A new version of the Korp frontend was released on March 24, 2025.
Performance
The app now loads a little bit faster, thanks to two changes:
First, we are looking into HTTP caching, meaning that your browser can reuse previous data requests instead of sending new ones. You will notice this if you do a search and then reload the page. (Technically, however, this is not a change to the Korp frontend, but to the backend.)
The second change involves corpus time data, that is, the number of tokens per year in each corpus. This data is needed for a few features, including the graph in the corpus selector, and the app used to be stalled until the data had been loaded. Now, we let the app load with those features hidden, and then show them once the time data request is done.
User interface
Beside the need for speed, there are a few modifications to how the search results can be controlled. Most notably, you don't have to enable the Statistics or Word Picture results manually. They just load when you open the corresponding tab.
While removing the Enable statistics/word picture options, we saw that the other display options would also go better elsewhere. The page-size and sort options have now moved into the KWIC result tab, and the statistics grouping option has moved into the Statistics tab.
Furthermore, there is a new layout for the search options in the Simple search mode. They are now in columns next to the text input, with helpful tooltips to explain their meaning. The initial/medial/final part checkboxes now also depend on each other, since enabling medial part is equivalent to enabling the other two.
Word Picture
A little extra care was given to the Word Picture feature. Users were often confused because the frequency numbers next to the listed words did not correspond to the list order. Higher numbers were often in the top but not always. This is because there are many different measures for relatedness, and we used to show one (absolute frequency) but sort by another (Lexicographer's Mutual Information, LMI). Now, you can instead simply switch between these measures, and we show and sort by the measure you choose.
See our blog post about the new GU Journalen corpus (in Swedish) for a few interesting Word Picture examples.