A Digital Library of Grammatical Resources for European Dialects

Abstract

The paper illustrates the methodology at the basis of the design of a digital library system that enables the management of linguistic resources of curated dialect data. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geolinguistic parameters. Secondly, the information management system has to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order). Thirdly, user-friendly graphical interfaces must give easy access to language resources and make the building of the language resources easier and distributed. This work, which stems from a project named ASIt (Atlante Sintattico d’Italia), is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studying linguistic micro-variation

A linked open data approach for geolinguistics applications

“…The ASIt enterprise builds on a long standing tradition of collecting and analyzing linguistic corpora, which has originated different projects over the years [3,1,2]. Dialectal data stored in ASIt were gathered during a twenty-year-long survey investigating the distribution of several grammatical phenomena across the dialects of Italy [8].…”

“…Traditional studies in dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. Since the end of the XIX century, 1 linguists have produced extensive cartographic work, most notably in the form of linguistic atlases [25]. Manuel Alvar López, one of the most important dialectologist of Spain, presented in [5] an automated linguistic atlas which highlighted the advantages of a computerized versus manually drawn and reproduced atlas; the database developed for this atlas facilitated mapping on-demand and preparation of indices used in the interpretation of linguistic atlases.…”

A curated and evolving linguistic linked dataset

“…The ASIt enterprise builds on a long standing tradition of collecting and analyzing linguistic corpora, which has given rise to different efforts and projects over the years [3,1,2]. Dialectal data stored in the ASIt were gathered during a twenty-year-long survey investigating the distribution of several grammatical phenomena across the dialects of Italy [4].…”

“…The World Atlas of Languages Structures (WALS) [8] is the first linguistic feature atlas on a world-wide scale and one of the largest projects with 160 maps showing the geographical distribution of structural linguistic features. 1 In Europe, the Common Language Resources and Technology In- 1 http://www.wals.info/ frastructure project (CLARIN) [14] aims at creating an infrastructure which makes language resources (annotated recordings, texts, lexica, ontologies) and technology (speech recognisers, lemmatisers, parsers, summarisers, information extractors) available and readily usable to scholars of all disciplines, in particular the humanities and social sciences. One of the most important applications of linguistic databases is linguistic cartography, the goal of which is to create geographical maps which visualize particular linguistic features.…”

“…In this paper, we address the problem of the design and distribution of language resources by adopting an approach based on the Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm [9] and exploiting its ability to enable interoperability at a datalevel by overcoming the single collections characteristics and the particular system and its technological choices. We focus on the Atlante Sintattico d'Italia, Syntactic Atlas of Italy (ASIt) enterprise [1], a scientific project carried on as a part of the Edisyn network. We define a mapping from a conceptual model of the ASIt linguistic curated database to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) schema, thus providing an instrument to expose linguistic data as LOD.…”