The long road to language resources—CLARIN

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CLARIN, the ‘Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure’ is a European initiative to support the creation, curation and exploration of language material for research purposes and for as broad an audience as possible. The stated aim is that you should not need to be a technical expert to use the corpora, lexica and annotations that are targeted in CLARIN.

It is part of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). This is a huge project, with a budget of some €104 million. CLARIN-D is the German section of CLARIN and it recently had its 2-year showcase, which I was able to attend (see current activities at http://clarin-d.net/de/aktuelles/). Given that this is the first two years of a longterm project it has clearly achieved a great deal already, and certainly more than can be glimpsed in a short blog post.

This is part of a ‘roadmap’ process that actually leads somewhere, unlike the Australian version I reported on earlier that appears to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars only to have been abandoned even before it was published.

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Who gives a Gonski for Indigenous education?

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Who gives a Gonski for Indigenous Education? Answer: three Australian states and the Australian Senate which yesterday passed the Australian Education Reform bill, aka the Gonski plan. This is a wonderful achievement. Funding based on children’s needs. At last, schools with lots of disadvantaged Indigenous children can get funding by right and not by favour. … Read more

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Light Warlpiri hits the news!

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Wow! Light Warlpiri has hit the news big time. Carmel O’Shannessy just published a paper in Language on it. And it’s been taken up as news: The Atlantic, and you can see it and other renditions in Google News. And the Atlantic makes use of the material on Carmel O’Shannessy’s research page. OK – they … Read more

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Supporting language use and learning

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In the midst of Endangered Languages Week there is the good and the bad. The good was the delight of reading Rob Munro’s post on what his company Idibon intends to do for NLP for endangered languages. The company is advised by Chris Manning, and I learned today that his wonderful Warlpiri dictionary presentation tool … Read more

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Print on demand, again

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In an earlier post I talked about getting texts from Toolbox into books for use in the language community. The print-on-demand service I was so enthusiastic about and which I pointed to for copies of my books, has now closed, fallen victim to a change of bookshop ownership at Melbourne Uni. After talking with Manfred … Read more

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Exploring data from language documentation

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The workshop ‘Exploring data from language documentation’, organised by Kilu von Prince and Felix Rau, (May 10/11 2013) included a number of interesting presentations which can be downloaded here: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/1701.html

I talked about some gaps in the current language documentation workflow and tools that could help fill them, in particular ExSite9 for improving metadata collection, and EOPAS for presenting text and media online for citation and verification.

Christian Chanard and Amina Mettouchi showed a hybrid version of Elan they have developed that allows parsing and morphological labeling, as well as another tool that allows websearching of Elan files. http://corpafroas.tge-adonis.fr/tools.html

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Farewell Darrell Tryon, farewell Kim McKenzie

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This week we mourn the loss of two ANU colleagues, whose deaths have ended their different and remarkable contributions to documenting societies, languages and ways of life. Darrell Tryon documented new and old languages in Vanuatu, the Solomons and Australia, helped speakers work on their own languages, and wrote about the history of languages. Initial … Read more

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Models of community engagement: LIP discussion

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Lauren Gawne recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

This month’s discussion focused on the ways in which we engage with the speakers of the languages that we study. The general understanding of community engagement was work that you do that doesn’t necessarily directly benefit your own linguistic goals, but which will be of benefit or interest to the speakers you work with. Not all engagement is the same though. We had a range of experiences to draw on – although what is always readily apparent in these conversations is that every field site and group of speakers offers a unique situation. As always, please feel free to leave your own experiences in the comments below to broaden the conversation!

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Imagine … a world without PARADISEC

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Imagine … a world without memories is the evocative and chilling title of a project organised by the National Committee of Australia for the UNESCO Memory of the World. Through the Australian Memory of the World Register, the Committee, mostly volunteers, are building public awareness of the importance of maintaining records and objects associated with … Read more

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Workshop: Phonetics and phonology of Australian Indigenous languages

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Workshop Website University of Western Sydney/Bankstown Campus 13-14 June 2013 Sponsored by the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA), the MARCS Institute (UWS) and the School of Humanities and Communication Arts (UWS) This workshop has a thematic focus on the phonetics and phonology of Australian Indigenous languages. The aim is to bring together specialists … Read more

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