Svarna: An Open Corpus Workbench for Modern Greek

Stergios Chatzikyriakidis

cs.CLJul 1, 2026

Svarna: An Open Corpus Workbench for Modern Greek

Authors: Stergios Chatzikyriakidis

Organizations: Department of Philology, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

Abstract

This paper introduces Svarna, a free, open-source, web-based corpus workbench for modern Greek. Svarna integrates five databases covering various registers, institutional, literary, dialectal, social media, and historical, to provide a total of more than 507 million words and around 29 million sentences. This platform addresses the chronic gaps in Greek language technology. Although various corpus resources exist, they are scattered across different platforms, and in many cases, institutional access is restricted or they are no longer available online. Svarna integrates these resources into a single interface that can be used without logging in, installation, or specialized training. This system provides a concordancer with KWIC marking capabilities, frequency analysis including register-by-register normalization, collocation extraction using mutual information, a dictionary of 93 Greek discourse markers providing distribution profiles, text-level analysis tools including n-grams, variants, and collocation networks, register comparison using log-ratio, regular expression search, and an optional LLM layer for pragmatic annotation and free research mode. This platform is built upon SQLite FTS5 full-text indexes provided via a FastAPI backend, deployed as Docker containers on Azure, and released under the MIT license. Source code, build scripts, and deployment configurations are publicly available on GitHub. Users can add their own corpora and deploy their own instances. This document describes the system design, corpus structure, and use cases demonstrating the various queries supported by the platform. Svarna serves as the first step in exploring available data and is expected to lay the foundation for more comprehensive research in the future.

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