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I searched for a word inviting in coca and I got about 50 thousand usage examples. That's a lot of data.

I'm interested in, if there is some possibility to refine the search, especially to search only certain meanings of the word (e.g. attractive) or at least refine it by part of speech. If there is not such a tool, could you refer some techniques I can use to refine search and possibly implement (if I have the search result data)?

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    Meaning is contextual, so no, it is impossible in principle.
    – Alex B.
    Oct 25, 2016 at 15:48
  • It's not wholly impossible, @AlexB. Most words in COCA are embedded in text, so there will often be enough context to decide among different meanings of a word. Obviously this can't be done 100%.
    – Colin Fine
    Oct 25, 2016 at 18:10
  • @ColinFine Exactly.
    – xralf
    Oct 29, 2016 at 18:37
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    @ColinFine Yes but you have to manually examine your data.
    – Alex B.
    Nov 3, 2017 at 15:40

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You can use part of speech tags from coca, and there is a video explaining it on YouTube, see The Linguistic Teaching Resources Hub.

I am not aware of meaning annotation in coca.

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    That's right. inviting.[j*] or in their new syntax inviting_j will search for the adjective "inviting" as opposed to the verb. You can search for synonyms, but I don't think you can apply them to a word to select one meaning from others.
    – Colin Fine
    Oct 25, 2016 at 13:30
  • @OK This is certainly certain level of improving the search (the easier part, but great it works).
    – xralf
    Oct 29, 2016 at 18:42
  • POS search is easy (and trivial). I believe the question was how to "search only certain meanings of the word."
    – Alex B.
    Nov 3, 2017 at 15:38
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    @AlexB. From the original question *"or at least refine it by part of speech"*—this part of the question is answered, and I also note the absence of annotated word sense disambiguation in COCA. BTW, POS search is only trivial when it is already annotated.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Nov 3, 2017 at 16:29
  • It seems I overlooked that part, probably because I assumed everyone knew how to perform a POS search.
    – Alex B.
    Nov 4, 2017 at 2:48

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