Typically, researchers use TACT to retrieve occurrences of a word, word pattern, or word combination.
Output takes the form of a concordance, a list, or a table.
Programs also can do simple kinds of analysis, such as sorted frequencies of letters, words or phrases, type-token statistics, or ranking of collocates to a word by their strength of association. TACT is intended for individual literary texts, or small to mid-size groups of such texts, such as Chaucer's poetry, Francis Bacon's Essays , Shakespeare's plays, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , John Irving's The Cider House Rules , similar works in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and other modern European languages or languages using a roman alphabet, and classical Greek. In most instances, mark-up helps the researcher do analysis afterwards. For instance, words may be retrieved by speaker if the original text includes a tag before each passage that is spoken by someone different. The TACT system is multilingual.