Digital Tools Summit in Linguistics
Issue Statements
Please view participant Issue Statements in advance of the conference.
Also, the Program and Local Arrangements pages were updated on 9 June 2006.
Purpose
Linguistics is at a critical moment, as the need for more accurate, re-useable and typologically diverse data, together with the increasing urgency of worldwide language documentation, converge to drive the development of digital tools and cyberinfrastructure. Access to language corpora has become indispensable for a wide range of linguistic inquiry, including basic research (in e.g. phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology, psycholinguistics and language documentation) and applied research (in e.g. speech engineering, sociolinguistic modeling, language revitalization and pedagogical materials development). This use of large and small corpora to conduct research on both well-documented and poorly-documented language varieties has resulted in the emergence of a new interdisciplinary confluence of computational linguistics, language documentation, and linguistic theory.
Linguists and language developers have particular challenges in developing high-quality, exchangeable, re-useable corpora: standards and tools for encoding and rendering, annotation, querying, archiving, and generating presentation formats are all in their infancy. Linguists' materials often include multiple modes of media, multiple languages, and multiple levels of analysis.
Previous efforts in this direction, such as the 2005 Summit for Digital Tools in the Humanities (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dtsummit/) and the 2000-2006 EMELD Toolroom (http://emeld.org/school/toolroom/index.html), have shown that linguistics has specific cyberinfrastructural needs not addressed to date by humanities computing initiatives. Linguists share with other scientists the challenges of multiple data formats (both new and legacy formats), different user capabilities, and they work in interdisciplinary environments. Like other areas of scientific research, linguistics must integrate developing new technologies, architectures, and standards into interoperable tools for a variety of linguistic work.
Program:
(See Program for more information)
Two days of discussion, largely in working groups divided by tool type and subspecialty. Each working group would be comprised of both programmers and ordinary working linguists. The first day would coincide with the last be devoted to prioritizing aims for tools and subspecialties; a plenary session reporting on the major findings would follow. On the second day, each working group would produce one charette (sketch) of a tool or data model.
Associated Meetings: (see Links for more info)
The DT-Summit/Linguistics will meet immediately before the Linguistic Society of America's summer meeting "Connections within and across boundaries" http://www.lsadc.org/info/meet-summer06-cfp.cfm , and immediately after the E-MELD (Electronic Metastructures for Endangered Language Data) meeting entitled "Tools and Standards: The State of the Art" http://emeld.org/workshop/2006/ . The conclusions of the E-MELD workshop will provide an ideal introduction to the themes of the Digital Tools Summit for Linguistics. During the E-MELD meeting itself, the current tools (and the lack thereof) will be evaluated. These conclusions, presented on the final day (and DT-Summit/Linguistics' first day) will allow us to easily prioritize the work in the DT-Summit.
Participation: (Refer to Call for Papers for details on how to submit)
A one-page issue paper on the most pressing issues in developing cyberinfrastructure and digital tools for linguistics. An issue paper should not present an individual's own project: participants will not be asked to present their own research but to participate in the summit's dialog, bringing the expertise gained from their own development and use of digital tools for research and education. Each issue paper should be accompanied by a short (one half-page or less) biography. Based on the issue papers submitted, the organizing committee will select a diverse group of invitees from a variety of scholarly fields. .
Send submissions to: pri@ku.edu (see Call for Papers for details)
