In order to make use of a linguistically annotated text corpus powerful specialized tools for corpus exploitation are needed. At the IMS, in cooperation with the TIGER project, we have built the query engine ('TIGERSearch'), which can access structural text annotation in an efficient manner. In earlier projects, another corpus search tool, the IMS Corpus Query Processor (CQP) has been implemented, which handles corpora with 'positional information' like part-of-speech and lemma information and non-recursive structural information.

On the basis of these corpus search engines query collection have been built in order to extract corpus evidence for lexical and syntactic properties of words.