RefCo and its Checker: Improving Language Documentation Corpora’s Reusability Through a Semi-Automatic Review Process

Herbert Lange, Jocelyn Aznar


Abstract
The QUEST (QUality ESTablished) project aims at ensuring the reusability of audio-visual datasets (Wamprechtshammer et al., 2022) by devising quality criteria and curating processes. RefCo (Reference Corpora) is an initiative within QUEST in collaboration with DoReCo (Documentation Reference Corpus, Paschen et al. (2020)) focusing on language documentation projects. Previously, Aznar and Seifart (2020) introduced a set of quality criteria dedicated to documenting fieldwork corpora. Based on these criteria, we establish a semi-automatic review process for existing and work-in-progress corpora, in particular for language documentation. The goal is to improve the quality of a corpus by increasing its reusability. A central part of this process is a template for machine-readable corpus documentation and automatic data verification based on this documentation. In addition to the documentation and automatic verification, the process involves a human review and potentially results in a RefCo certification of the corpus. For each of these steps, we provide guidelines and manuals. We describe the evaluation process in detail, highlight the current limits for automatic evaluation and how the manual review is organized accordingly.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.291
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2721–2729
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.291
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Herbert Lange and Jocelyn Aznar. 2022. RefCo and its Checker: Improving Language Documentation Corpora’s Reusability Through a Semi-Automatic Review Process. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2721–2729, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
RefCo and its Checker: Improving Language Documentation Corpora’s Reusability Through a Semi-Automatic Review Process (Lange & Aznar, LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.291.pdf