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FieldWorks Language Explorer is software for building lexical resources and analyzing language data. It combines a lexical database with text analysis, allowing forms in a text corpus to be connected to entries and proposed analyses into morphemes. Its official documentation describes both manual and automatic word parsing and the production of dictionary and grammatical resources.^[ref]

For an illustrative workflow, a recorded occurrence of walked can be associated with a WALK lexeme, a segmentation into walk and -ed, and a past grammatical tense analysis. An interlinear gloss can display these aligned layers while preserving the original form. A later occurrence supplies a chance to test the analysis rather than merely reproduce a translation. Alternative segmentations and meanings must still be evaluated from evidence. FieldWorks Language Explorer organizes the data and proposed relationships; using the software does not itself establish that an analysis of linguistic morphology is correct.

An interlinear gloss aligns a linguistic example with an analysis of the meanings or grammatical properties of its words and morphemes. It commonly combines an original-language line, a segmented line, analytical labels and a freer translation. The aligned analysis provides information that the translation alone can conceal.

The Leipzig Glossing Rules by Bernard Comrie and others specify word alignment, matching hyphens at segmentable morpheme boundaries, and abbreviated grammatical labels.^[ref] In the original English illustration walk-ed / walk-PST, PST identifies past grammatical tense; the matching hyphens connect the ending with its proposed contribution. The unsegmented surface form is walked.

A matching number of boundaries does not prove the segmentation correct. The rules explicitly distinguish the gloss from the original data: different analyses can describe the same recorded form. An interlinear gloss therefore makes claims about linguistic morphology inspectable while preserving the need for independent evidence about those claims.