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TypeCraft collaborative databasing and resource sharing for linguists

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Abstract

Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a well established data format within philology and the structural and generative fields of linguistics. The best known format for an IGT is the one found in linguistic publications, where one line of text is followed by one line of glosses and one line of free translation. Although used in different functions, IGTs are ubiquitous in linguistic research and publications. Yet they also have been criticised for being fabricated and unreliable in some of their uses. However that might be, IGTs represent linguistic knowledge, and in particular for less-resourced languages, they are not rarely the only structured data available. Under the auspices of the Digital Humanities, linguists increasingly focus on the advantages of Semantic Web technologies. Presenting the modules and procedures of the web-based linguistic application TypeCraft (TC), we outline how the creation of IGTs can become an integral part of a shared linguistic methodology. Linguistic services have the potential of allowing efficient data management, and their strength lies in facilitating new forms of collaboration beyond social networking. They pave the way towards what one might call shared methodologies. In this paper we would like to discuss the linguistic value of web-based technology. By presenting the functionalities of TC and giving a detailed summary of online linguistic data creation and retrieval, we will present external and internal criteria for a single system evaluation of TC centred on usage objectives.

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Notes

  1. See also Tognini-Bonelli (2001) speaking for the field of corpus linguistics, and work by Bird (2009).

  2. FLEx is the successor of the (Shoebox)Toolbox system and belongs to the SIL group of linguistic software.

  3. ELAN is developed by the Language Archives group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

  4. For more information about SOA for linguists see Dima et al. (2012).

  5. In this article, IGTs are shown in examples (1)–(4), (5) and in Fig. 4.

  6. An in-depth description of the function of interlinear glossing, including a short historical overview, can be found in Lehmann (2004b).

  7. a Kwa language spoken in Ghana (ISO 639-3: aka).

  8. Due to the prosodic structure of Akan these two morphemes cannot always be distinguished by tone.

  9. Christaller (1933) uses as citation form of the verb mã while today mostly the form ma is used. We thank Per Baumann from the University in Zürich for clarifying this point.

  10. As Kofi Abrefa from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana points out, the present tense of mã has a high tone as in Kofi má me sika, meaning ‘Kofi gives him/her money’. The past tense however has a low tone on both vowels as in Kofi mààno sika ‘Kofi gave him/her money.’ However, in a complex sentence the tone marking indicates in addition to the Tense, Aspect, Mood (TAM) features also subordination, so that má à‘gave’ is now marked by a high tone on the first vowel and a low tone on the second, meaning ‘when he gave money …’. This holds for Asante but not for Fante, where the Asante-like subordinate tonal pattern also occurs in main clauses.

  11. In a project together with Uninett Sigma AS, which manages the national infrastructure for computational science in Norway, we worked on testing scalable (elastic) deployment of TC in a unified cloud solution offered by Uninett. Part of the project was scalability testing. To this end we created a test instance of the present TC system and imported 3,148 texts of various length with 19,484 sentences in total from the POS-tagged People’s Daily Corpus from Fujitsu Research and Development Center and Peking University. The work is still ongoing at the time of publication.

  12. Paunaka is a Southern Arawakan language spoken in Bolivia, ISO-639-3:pnk (pending Associated Change request number: 2011-056).

  13. Lower and Upper Tanara are Athabaskan languages spoken in the USA, East central Alaska, at the Tanana River area. ISO-639:tau.

  14. a Bantu language spoken in Uganda. ISO 639-3:lug.

  15. ISO.639-3:po.r.

  16. a Bantu language composed of the languages Nykore (ISO-639-3:nyn) and Kiga (ISO-639-3:cgg) spoken in Uganda.

  17. MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia: http://www.mediawiki.org.

  18. http://typecraft.org/typecraft.xsd.

  19. http://media.cidles.eu/poio/poio-api/ last accessed:09.26.13.

  20. CIDLeS is an acronym for the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Minde Portugal, http://www.cidles.eu.

  21. The IPA editor was created by T.P Szynalski and it accessible at http://ipa.typeit.org.

  22. TC also allows sentence level annotation which we will not further discuss here. We simply would like to note that sentence level tagging allows the flagging of construction level properties, such as its syntactic argument structure, situation type, aspect, modality, force and evidentiality.

  23. last accessed: 03.19.2013.

  24. http://typecraft.org/tc2wiki/Annotating_Akan.

  25. http://typecraft.org/tc2wiki/Typological_Features_Template_for_Ga.

  26. http://typecraft.org/tc2wiki/Current_events#User_survey.

  27. A Bantu language spoken in Uganda.

  28. Date of query 06-02-2013.

  29. http://moin.delph-in.net/.

  30. http://nltk.org.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this paper for their invaluable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Dorothee Beermann

  2. Ontotext AD, 1784, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Pavel Mihaylov

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  1. Dorothee Beermann
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Correspondence to Dorothee Beermann.

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Beermann, D., Mihaylov, P. TypeCraft collaborative databasing and resource sharing for linguists. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 203–225 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9257-9

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