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Language Technology for Digital Linguistics: Turning the Linguistic Survey of India into a Rich Source of Linguistic Information

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Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10761))

Abstract

We present our work aiming at turning the linguistic material available in Grierson’s classical Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) from a printed discursive textual description into a formally structured digital language resource, a database suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations of the languages of South Asia. While doing so, we develop state-of-the-art language technology for automatically extracting the relevant grammatical information from the text of the LSI, and interactive linguistic information visualization tools for better analysis and comparisons of languages based on their structural and functional features.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In linguistic works, South Asia is defined as the seven countries Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, plus some immediately adjacent areas (e.g., Tibet).

  2. 2.

    wals.info.

  3. 3.

    apics.org.

  4. 4.

    sails.clld.org.

  5. 5.

    phoible.org.

  6. 6.

    https://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/korp-info.

  7. 7.

    For instance, location data come mainly from the Glottolog: http://glottolog.org.

  8. 8.

    http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/lsi/ (Page images, no text search available.).

  9. 9.

    http://www.geonames.org/.

  10. 10.

    A Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southern Tedim township, Chin State, Burma.

  11. 11.

    sails.clld.org.

  12. 12.

    http://clld.org/.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented here was funded by the Swedish Research Council as part of the project South Asia as a linguistic area? Exploring big-data methods in areal and genetic linguistics (2015–2019, contract no. 421-2014-969), and by the University of Gothenburg as part of its funding of the Språkbanken language technology and digital humanities infrastructure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Lars Borin & Shafqat Mumtaz Virk

  2. Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Anju Saxena

Authors
  1. Lars Borin
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  2. Shafqat Mumtaz Virk
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  3. Anju Saxena
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shafqat Mumtaz Virk .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CIC, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico

    Alexander Gelbukh

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Borin, L., Virk, S.M., Saxena, A. (2018). Language Technology for Digital Linguistics: Turning the Linguistic Survey of India into a Rich Source of Linguistic Information. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10761. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77113-7_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77113-7_42

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