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Usage guide to MOMFER

MOMFER is an online tool that allows users to efficiently search [Thompson's Motif-Index]. This page provides documentation about most of the features and search functionalities.

Individual terms and phrases

Find motifs containing the term troll: troll

Motifs have four fields: a description, additional information, a motif ID, and references, containing names of researchers and countries. By default the tool will search for matches in the description and additional information of a motif. Furthermore, the Indexer expands each search word to its two direct hyperonymic parents as provided by [WordNet]. If a user enters the query cat, the system will also look for words that fall under feline and carnivore, for example lion or dog. Motifs matching only the expanded search terms will be ranked lower than those containing the initial searcg term because of the weights assigned to the different search fields.

Find motifs containing the phrase: "black cat"

Phrases can be searched for using string surrounded by double quotes. Note that this is different from boolean AND searches where the order of the two words is not important.

Multi word search (Boolean operators)

When searching for two or more words, the index applies the same procedure as for single word searches, including the semantic expansion. Users can define the relation between different words using the boolean operators OR, AND and NOT (capitals are obligatory).

OR

By default all queries are represented as logically inclusive OR statements. This means that when a user searches for two words, as in cat transformation, the index will search for all motifs containing either cat or transformation. Motifs that contain both search words are considered to be better matches and will be ranked higher than those containing only a single expression.

AND

To force the system to exclusively retrieve motifs containing both search terms, users need to add the boolean operator AND, as in cat AND transformation. Naturally this can be extended to as many search terms as the user requires.

NOT

To exclude a particular query term from the results, users need to add the boolean operator NOT preceded by AND, as in magic AND NOT witch.

Fields

Users can override and adjust the default search (description and additional) by making explicit in which field they want to search using the following keywords:

• motif (to search for motif ID's, e.g. motif:A100);
• description (to search for words solely in motif descriptions, e.g. description:magic);
• additional (to search for words solely in the additional descriptions of motifs, e.g. additional:dragon);
• references (to search for words that are part of the references (e.g. sources or countries of origin) in the index, e.g. references:Baughman);
• location (to search for motifs based on their country of origin, e.g. location:china).

Also, it is possible to find motifs based on their WordNet category. For example: wn:color returns motifs containing words with 'color' as one of its hyperonymic parents (e.g. 'black' or 'green') but which do not contain the word color itself.

Inexact terms

The search tool enable searches using two regular expressions:

• \* (represents any number of characters, e.g. cat\* returns 'cats', 'caterpillar', 'catapult' etc.)
• ? (represents a single character, e.g. c?t finds 'cat', 'cot, 'cut' etc.)

Other regular expressions are not supported.