Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description
By Steven Bird, Gary F. Simons. arXiv.org, 2002
325 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The process of documenting and describing the world's languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation, and dissemination. While these technologies greatly enhance our ability to create digital data, their uncritical adoption has compromised our ability to preserve this data. Consequently, new digital language resources of all kinds-lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings-are proving difficult to reuse and less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. This article is concerned with the portability of digital language resources, specifically with their ability to transcend computer environments, scholarly communities, domains of application, and the passage of time. We review existing software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description, and analyze portability problems in the seven areas of CONTENT, FORMAT, DISCOVERY, ACCESS, CITATION, PRESERVATION, and RIGHTS. We articulate the values that underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and lay out an extensive set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-wide discussion that we envisage.*
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3692bae524f3e51a3a2aaada1b1a39c670c7292
How researchers see this paper
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In Artificial Intelligence
- Steven Bird
- Michael J. Paul
- Mohit Bansal
- Samuel R. Bowman
- Weiwei Jiang
- Anna Korhonen
- Yoav Goldberg
- Preslav Nakov
In Information Systems
In Literature and Literary Theory
Citations in the corpus
- Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal Resources with ELAN (2004, background): “For a good description of requirements for archive formats, see (Bird & Simons, 2003).”
- Decolonising Speech and Language Technology (2020, background): “Like many, I have taken this crisis as an golden opportunity for technology, prioritising data capture over local self-determination, in such areas as digital preservation (Bird and Simons, 2003), capacity building (Bird, 2010; Bird and Chiang, 2012; Bird et al.”