To use WordValue, you need two files: a table containing a list of search words (and usually some
additional information) and a text file in which the words from the table will be searched.
You can try out WordValue right away
with several preset text files (e.g. The happy prince by Oscar Wilde)
and several preset tables (e.g. the 200 most frequent English words)
by going straight to the RESULTS tab.
Otherwise you can upload your own files:
Go to the TEXTS tab and click the button NEW TEXT.
Then select and upload a text file from your computer.
The existing filename is used by default.
Please note that uploaded text files need to be in .txt format with UTF-8 encoding.
You can easily convert a Word document into a .txt file by saving a copy of it
and changing the file type option to .txt. Then click Tools in the same window.
Select "Web options", go to the tab Encoding
and select "Unicode (UTF-8)" in the dropdown menu "Save this document as".
You also have the option to enter text directly into a text box and save it with a filename.
In that case the text is automatically saved in UTF-8 format.
Go to the tab TABLES and click the button NEW TABLE. Then select and upload a new table
from your computer. The table can be either an Excel spreadsheet or a .csv file.
Please note that uploaded .csv files should use UTF-8 encoding.
A possible table may look like this:
keys |
Part_of_speech |
Rank |
Frequency |
Length_letters |
the |
determiner |
1 |
6187267 |
3 |
be |
verb |
2 |
4239632 |
2 |
of |
preposition |
3 |
3093444 |
2 |
and |
conjunction |
4 |
2687863 |
3 |
The first line of each column in the spreadsheet needs to specify the attribute
(i.e. the category of information contained within the column), e.g. rank or frequency of the word.
The first line thus acts as a header.
The example table shown here avoids spaces in these labels (as is customary),
but WordValue also accepts spaces.
The first column in the spreadsheet needs to contain the keys (i.e. the
word forms that are searched in the text, and onto which the information from
the other columns is mapped), e.g. the or be.
The other columns specify the values that are linked to the individual keys,
e.g. the part of speech determiner or the rank 1.
The first cell in the spreadsheet needs to be called keys.
Note that each key needs to be unique and can only be assigned a single code for each attribute.
Search keys may contain internal spaces, hyphens and even line breaks.
Keys in Excel spreadsheets may also contain commas
(in contrast to keys in .csv files, where this is not possible).
Please note that even if you only want to use WordValue to search for a list of words in a target
text, the software requires a search table. This means that you need a second column with a dummy
value of your choice (e.g. the value 1 in all cells).
While there are no restrictions on the size of the texts and tables, the time required for the
first run of the experiment increases with both documents’ number of lines, as WordValue
automatically computes the frequency of all keys from the table and of all the tokens in the text
for further use. Please make sure to use Excel files with a single worksheet and a finite number of
columns with content.
If you want to see the content of a text or table while using WordValue,
go to the tabs TEXTS or TABLES and click on the filename to see the content of the corresponding
text or table. To delete files, use the DELETE button next to the filename.