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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: 12.3.0
  • Talks: 6,419 TED Talks
  • Languages: 34 translation languages
  • NLP Engine: spaCy 3.8 (en_core_web_lg)
  • Last Updated: April 10, 2026

Recent Updates (v11–v12)

User Interface

  • Multilingual UI — Interface available in English, Japanese (日本語), Chinese (中文), and Korean (한국어). Use the language buttons on any page to switch.
  • Streamlined search workflow — The RESET button has been removed. You can now start a new search at any time by simply entering a query and clicking SEARCH, just like a regular search engine.

New Search Features

  • KWIC concordance view — Toggle between list and KWIC (Key Word In Context) display modes for linguistic analysis
  • Named entity (NER) search — Use %PERSON, %ORG, %GPE, %DATE, etc. in Advanced Search to find named entities
  • Collocation analysis — MI, t-score, and DP statistics with lemma-based grouping in Collocation mode
  • Collocation network — Interactive force-directed graph visualization of word co-occurrence relationships
  • Export search results — Download token search results as TSV (ZIP) or JSON with context, linguistic annotations, and translations for research use

Collocation & Visualization

  • NER-enhanced n-grams — Named entities replaced with %TYPE labels (e.g., %PERSON said, in %GPE) for entity-aware frequency analysis
  • Network zoom slider — Zoom control (50%–200%) replaces scroll-based zooming for more precise graph navigation
  • Text highlight default off — Keywords and discourse markers highlighting is now off by default for a cleaner transcript view

Construction & Data

  • Construction category filter — Patterns categorized into Phrasal Verb, Idiom, Grammatical, Collocation, Discourse, and NER Pattern, with filter UI
  • 1,160 construction patterns — Including pseudo-cleft, resultative, NER patterns, adjective-subjectivity constructions, and other linguistic structures
  • 6,419 TED Talks — Over 1,100 new talks added since v10

Features

  • Full-text search across all TED Talk transcripts
  • Advanced linguistic search with POS tags, lemmas, dependency relations, morphological features, and named entities
  • KWIC concordance view for linguistic analysis
  • Collocation mode — N-gram frequency (1-gram to 4-gram), collocation statistics, and network visualization
  • Construction search for 1,160 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)