The Open Text Collections project establishes a high-quality publication channel for interlinear glossed text from endangered languages. Text collection will by made available in an open interoperable format and as a more traditional book publication. The project addresses a variety of audiences, eg. community members, typological linguists, anthropologists, NLP practitioners.

Many NLP resources and programs focus on a handful of major languages. But there are thousands of languages with low or no resources available as structured data. This paper shows the extraction of 40k examples with interlinear morpheme translation in 280 different languages from LaTeX-based publications of the open access publisher Language Science Press. These examples are transformed into Linked Data. We use LIGT for modelling and enrich the data with Wikidata and Glottolog. The data is made available as HTML, JSON, JSON-LD and N-quads, and query facilities for humans (Elasticsearch) and machines (API) are provided.

For most of the world’s languages, no primary data are available, even as many languages are disappearing. Throughout the last two decades, however, language documentation projects have produced substantial amounts of primary data from a wide variety of endangered languages. These resources are still in the early days of their exploration. One of the factors that makes them hard to use is a relative lack of standardized annotation conventions. In this paper, we will describe common practices in existing corpora in order to facilitate their future processing. After a brief introduction of the main formats used for annotation files, we will focus on commonly used tiers in the widespread ELAN and Toolbox formats. Minimally, corpora from language documentation contain a transcription tier and an aligned translation tier, which means they constitute parallel corpora. Additional common annotations include named references, morpheme separation, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, part-of-speech tags and notes.

This paper reports on the harvesting, analysis, and enrichment of 20k documents from 4 different endangered language archives in 300 different low-resource languages. The documents are heterogeneous as to their provenance (holding archive, language, geographical area, creator) and internal structure (annotation types, metalanguages), but they have the ELAN-XML format in common. Typical annotations include sentence-level translations, morpheme-segmentation, morpheme-level translations, and parts-of-speech. The ELAN-format gives a lot of freedom to document creators, and hence the data set is very heterogeneous. We use regularities in the ELAN format to arrive at a common internal representation of sentences, words, and morphemes, with translations into one or more additional languages. Building upon the paradigm of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD, Chiarcos, Nordhoff, et al. 2012), the document elements receive unique identifiers and are linked to other resources such as Glottolog for languages, Wikidata for semantic concepts, and the Leipzig Glossing Rules list for category abbreviations. We provide an RDF export in the LIGT format (Chiarcos & Ionov 2019), enabling uniform and interoperable access with some semantic enrichments to a formerly disparate resource type difficult to access. Two use cases (semantic search and colexification) are presented to show the viability of the approach.

This paper describes a collection of 20k ELAN annotation files harvested from five different endangered language archives. The ELAN files form a very heterogeneous set, but the hierarchical configuration of their tiers allow, in conjunction with the tier content, to identify transcriptions, translations, and glosses. These transcriptions, translations, and glosses are queryable across archives. Small analyses of graphemes (transcription tier), grammatical and lexical glosses (gloss tier), and semantic concepts (translation tier) show the viability of the approach. The use of identifiers from OLAC, Wikidata and Glottolog allows for a better integration of the data from these archives into the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud.

This paper describes a repository of example sentences in three endangered Athabascan languages: Koyukon, Upper Tanana, Lower Tanana. The repository allows researchers or language teachers to browse the example sentence corpus to either investigate the languages or to prepare teaching materials. The originally heterogeneous text collection was imported into a SOLR store via the POIO bridge. This paper describes the requirements, implementation, advantages and drawbacks of this approach and discusses the potential to apply it for other languages of the Athabascan family or beyond.

We present texigt, a command-line tool for the extraction of structured linguistic data from LaTeX source documents, and a language resource that has been generated using this tool: a corpus of interlinear glossed text (IGT) extracted from open access books published by Language Science Press. Extracted examples are represented in a simple XML format that is easy to process and can be used to validate certain aspects of interlinear glossed text. The main challenge involved is the parsing of TeX and LaTeX documents. We review why this task is impossible in general and how the texhs Haskell library uses a layered architecture and selective early evaluation (expansion) during lexing and parsing in order to provide access to structured representations of LaTeX documents at several levels. In particular, its parsing modules generate an abstract syntax tree for LaTeX documents after expansion of all user-defined macros and lexer-level commands that serves as an ideal interface for the extraction of interlinear glossed text by texigt. This architecture can easily be adapted to extract other types of linguistic data structures from LaTeX source documents.

Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.

This paper describes the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). The OWLG is an initiative concerned with linguistic data by scholars from diverse fields, including linguistics, NLP, and information science. The primary goal of the working group is to promote the idea of open linguistic resources, to develop means for their representation and to encourage the exchange of ideas across different disciplines. This paper summarizes the progress of the working group, goals that have been identified, problems that we are going to address, and recent activities and ongoing developments. Here, we put particular emphasis on the development of a Linked Open Data (sub-)cloud of linguistic resources that is currently being pursued by several OWLG members.