1 / 20

What Linguists Want

What Linguists Want. (we think) Helen Aristar Dry & Anthony Aristar LINGUIST List & E-MELD. Language Documentation Used. Research: Historical / comparative Ling Typology Language description Phonology & phonetics Syntax Psycholinguistics Discourse Analysis Anthropological linguistics

leo-valdez
Download Presentation

What Linguists Want

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. What Linguists Want (we think) Helen Aristar Dry & Anthony Aristar LINGUIST List & E-MELD

  2. Language Documentation Used • Research: • Historical / comparative Ling • Typology • Language description • Phonology & phonetics • Syntax • Psycholinguistics • Discourse Analysis • Anthropological linguistics • Ethnomusicology • Teaching of all of the above

  3. So they want • Access • Central index of available material that supports flexible searching • Ability to preview material • Clear indication of access rights • Fast permissions (24-hour turnaround) • Stability • Cited versions of resources still available • Assembled sub-corpora available for a specified period of time, e.g., for the duration of a course

  4. Ease of use • Single interface — things work the same way in different archives (hard to misunderestimate the technical skill of academics) • Registration that persists—i.e., they don’t have to keep filling out registration forms These desiderata addressed in Scenarios 4 and 5

  5. And they would like • Ability to manipulate the data • To annotate corpus & share annotations with co-researchers • To track their own annotations & additions (as opposed to those of others) • To use a concordance program or other text processing program on the corpus • To extract relevant portions of texts and create a sub-sub-corpus; to share this sub-corpus with co-researchers or students

  6. They would REALLY like • Ability to identify resources by searching for linguistic structures, e.g. • Morphosyntactic categories (classifiers) • Morphosyntactic features (paucal) • Phonetic features (nasalization)* • Supersegmentals (tone)* • E.g. to search, not just the metadata, but the annotations and transcriptions of the archived material. *transcriptions, not sound — though search by sound would be even better

  7. Structures central to: • Research: • Historical / comparative Ling • Typology • Language description • Phonology & phonetics • Syntax • Teaching of all of the above

  8. Want to answer Qs like: • Do all IE languages have a contrast between voiced and unvoiced consonants? • Which languages have a distinction between trial and paucal number? • Where can I find examples of voiceless nasals (e.g., for a phonology problem)?

  9. Need to search for… • Morphemes representing morphosyntactic categories and features • Phonetic segments • Co-occurrences of segments, categories, & features

  10. Need to search by • Language families and subgroups • Feature classes (e.g. “stops”, not [ b ] ) • Morphosyntactic concepts (not just terminology, as this varies)

  11. Requires enhanced • Documentation • Meta-information • Search tools

  12. Documentation • Complete & transparent phonetic transcription • Detailed & transparent morphosyntactic annotation • Unambiguous language identification & classification

  13. Meta-Information • Unambiguous language identification system (language codes) • Language classification system, organizing languages into families and subgroups • Structured (graphic) taxonomy of phonetic features

  14. Meta-Information • Structured taxonomy of morphosyntactic categories and features (concepts and definitions) • Lists of morphosyntactic terminology in use by various groups • Mapping of the different terminology sets to the concepts and definitions

  15. Search tools that can • Interpret meta-information • Use it to construct intelligent searches • Search • Annotation & Transcription • OR Language profiles • OR Annotation indexes

  16. What we have • New Documentation • Audio / video recordings w/ translation • Phonetic transcription • Little morphosyntactic annotation (sometimes) • Legacy documentation • Detailed morphosyntactic annotation • Complete phonetic transcription • Non-transparent (idiosyncratic) markup • Inaccessible format (e.g., paper)

  17. What we have • Meta-information • Ontology of morphosyntactic concepts (GOLD —and others?) • Terminology sets (DatCat Registry) • Ontology of phonetic features • Language codes & associated family trees (Ethnologue based)

  18. What we have • Search • Prototype search of phonetic transcription using ontology of phonetic features, e.g. “Find all voiceless stops.” • Steps toward search of morphosyntactic features: • Language profiles which give the morphosyntactic categories and features used in a language (in XML) • Conversion path for • mapping idiosyncratic markup to the GOLD ontology (metaschemas + XSLT) • Converting GOLD compliant markup into RDF for searching via semantic web

  19. What we have: Tools • For ontology-based morphosyntactic annotation • OntoElan (MPI’s Elan + ontology-based terminology mapper) • OntoGloss (ontology-aware stand-off annotation of web documents) • For creating language profiles • FIELD

  20. What we need • Comprehensive, integrated system that supports this kind of searching • “Architecture, not just tools”

More Related