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Strictly speaking, these criteria are expressed as an MQL statement. But MQL is a rather complex language and therefore Bible OL has a more user-friendly way to specify simple search criteria.

If the user-friendly specification is used, a search criterion consists of:

The type of a sentence unit
One or more sentence unit features

A sentence unit is typically a word, but it can also be, for example, a clause or a phrase. A sentence unit has a number of features. If the sentence unit is word, the features may, for example, include part of speech and case. Each feature has a value. For example, the case feature may have the value genitive.

The search criteria may specify that a certain feature must have a certain value, or that the feature must not have a certain value. When the program generates questions, it will look for sentences containing sentence units of the specified type with the specified feature values.

The “Sentences” tab may look like this:

By choosing either “MQL statement to select sentences” or “Friendly feature selector”, you indicate if you want to specify the search criteria as an MQL statement or in a more user-friendly manner.

If the user-friendly method is selected, you use “Sentence unit type” to specify the kind of sentence unit that should be used when selecting sentences. The drop-down list next to “Feature” shows the features that are available for the specified sentence unit; and in the box below, you specify the feature values. In the illustration above, we have specified that we will be looking for words whose Part of speech feature is either “Noun” or “Personal pronoun”.

The “Clear” button erases all criteria on this page.

You will probably often want to use the same criteria for choosing sentence units as for choosing sentences. The check mark next to “Use this for sentence unit selection” indicates that sentence units should be chosen based on the same criteria as the ones specified here. This option is only available if the friendly feature selector is being used.

If you choose to specify the search criteria as an MQL statement, the program will surround the statement by [sentence ...], where the three dots are replaced by the statement you provide. This means that Bible OL will search for a sentence containing whatever is specified in the MQL statement. It is recommended to include the word NORETRIEVE in the MQL statement as this will cause the program to run considerably faster. More information about MQL can be found here.