• Towards a sustainable handling of interlinear-glossed text in language documentation

    Author(s):
    Robert Forkel, Johann-Mattis List (see profile) , Nathaniel A. Sims
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    Classical Philology and Linguistics, Digital Humanists, Digital Humanities East Asia, Linguistics
    Subject(s):
    Computational linguistics, Historical linguistics, Typology (Linguistics)
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    interlinear-glossed text, cross-linguistic data formats, computer-assisted language comparison, Qiang, Sino-Tibetan languages, Linguistic typology
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/nppg-x393
    Abstract:
    While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds' languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data. The sustainability problem is nicely reflected in the current practice of handling interlinear-glossed text, one of the crucial resources produced in language documentation. Although large collections of glossed texts have been produced so far, the current practice of data handling makes data reuse difficult. In order to address this problem, we propose a first framework for the computer-assisted, sustainable handling of interlinear-glossed text resources. Building on recent standardization proposals for word lists and structural datasets, combined with state-of-the-art methods for automated sequence comparison in historical linguistics, we show how our workflow can be used to lift a collection of interlinear-glossed Qiang texts (an endangered language spoken in Sichuan, China), and how the lifted data can assist linguists in their research.
    Notes:
    This is an updated version of a previously submitted preprint, submitted to Humanities Commons (http://doi.org/10.17613/gscz-mb13). We submit the accepted author version here again, since it has substantially changed since the first submission.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Journal:
    Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
    Volume:
    19
    Page Range:
    1 - 15
    ISSN:
    2375-4699
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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