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TCSE Documentation

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This is a user guide for TED Corpus Search Engine (TCSE).

TCSE is a search engine specializing in exploring transcripts of TED Talks. It has been created for educational and scientific purposes. TCSE uses data provided by TED under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, but it is not an official service of TED.

Current Version

  • Version: 13.6.1
  • Talks: 6,419 TED Talks
  • Languages: 34 translation languages
  • NLP Engine: spaCy 3.8 (en_core_web_lg)
  • Last Updated: April 10, 2026

How to Cite TCSE

When you refer to TCSE in published work, please cite the articles below:

Hasebe, Yoichiro. 2015. Design and implementation of an online corpus of presentation transcripts of TED Talks. Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 198(24). 174–182.

長谷部陽一郎 (Hasebe, Yoichiro). 2018. TED Corpus Search Engine: TED Talks を教育と研究に活用するためのプラットフォーム [TED Corpus Search Engine: A platform for using TED Talks in research and education]. 『英語コーパス研究』(English Corpus Studies) 25. 159–172.

Reporting the corpus size and version

The figures given in those articles describe the system as it was at the time of writing — the 2015 article, for instance, reports a corpus of about 1,800 talks. The corpus has grown considerably since then. When you state the size or version of the corpus you used, please take the values from the Current Version section above (and note the date on which you ran your queries), rather than repeating the numbers printed in the published papers.

The same applies to the query syntax: features such as typed noun-chunk slots and lemma echo were introduced in v13 and are not described in the earlier articles. See Advanced Search Query Syntax for the current specification.

For the version history, see the Changelog.

Features

  • Full-text search across all TED Talk transcripts
  • Advanced linguistic search with POS tags, lemmas, dependency relations, morphological features, and named entities
  • Typed noun-chunk slots — Constrain and cross-reference phrase-level slots (_{pron}, _{%PERSON}, _{[life]}, lemma echo :N/=N)
  • KWIC concordance view for linguistic analysis
  • Collocation mode — N-gram frequency (1-gram to 4-gram), collocation statistics, and network visualization
  • Construction search for 1,167 grammatical patterns (idioms, phrasal verbs, etc.)
  • 34 translation languages with cross-language search
  • Multilingual UI — English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean
  • HTML5 video player with segment-level playback and study mode
  • Text highlighting for keywords (TF-IDF) and discourse markers
  • Export search results as TSV or JSON for research and analysis

For articles about TCSE features, updates, and use cases, see the TCSE tag on the developer's blog.

Developer

TCSE and this documentation are developed and maintained by Yoichiro Hasebe (yohasebe@gmail.com)