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A Comprehensive Guide to AntConc 4: New Tools, Features, and AI Integration
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Description: AntConc is one of the most widely used desktop corpus analysis toolkits for Windows, MacOS and Linux computers. It has been used by researchers, teachers, and learners in over 140 countries across multiple fields and disciplines and is also used for text analysis tasks in major international companies. AntConc 4 was released in 2021, offering many new features and functions including the inclusion of a corpus repository and much improved speed and scalability. More recently, new tools have been added to the toolkit, including a linguistically meaningful and powerful word cloud generator and a Chat AI tool that integrates traditional corpus methods with generative AI. In this workshop, I will offer a comprehensive guide to AntConc 4, introducing all its main tools, features, and functions. First, I show how users can create, import, and export ready-built and custom user corpora. Next, I will introduce the core tools of AntConc, explaining some of the unique features that make them particularly useful for in-class teaching and learning using a data-driven learning (DDL) approach. Then, I will show how the results of traditional corpus methods can be used as input to the word cloud generation tool, leading to visually appealing, attractive, and meaningful visualizations of results. Finally, I will demonstrate how generative AI tools integrated into AntConc can be used to answer general questions about language, identify interesting and useful language patterns in loaded corpora, and offer deep, nuanced, context-dependent insights on language based on the results of traditional corpus methods.