The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax

Haspelmath, Martín

doi:10.1515/flin.2011.002

Cited by 251 publications

(182 citation statements)

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“…In this paper, we have described the creation of SeedLing, a foundation text for a Universal Corpus, following the guidelines of Abney and Bird (2010;2011). To do this, we cleaned and standardised data from several multilingual data sources: ODIN, Omniglot, the UDHR, Wikipedia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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SeedLing: Building and Using a Seed corpus for the Human Language Project

Emerson

Tan²,

Fertmann³

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

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A broad-coverage corpus such as the Human Language Project envisioned by Abney and Bird (2010) would be a powerful resource for the study of endangered languages. Existing corpora are limited in the range of languages covered, in standardisation, or in machine-readability. In this paper we present SeedLing, a seed corpus for the Human Language Project. We first survey existing efforts to compile cross-linguistic resources, then describe our own approach. To build the foundation text for a Universal Corpus, we crawl and clean texts from several web sources that contain data from a large number of languages, and convert them into a standardised form consistent with the guidelines of Abney and Bird (2011). The resulting corpus is more easily-accessible and machine-readable than any of the underlying data sources, and, with data from 1451 languages covering 105 language families, represents a significant base corpus for researchers to draw on and add to in the future. To demonstrate the utility of SeedLing for cross-lingual computational research, we use our data in the test application of detecting similar languages.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several years ago, Abney and Bird (2010;2011) posed the challenge of building a Universal Corpus, naming it the Human Language Project. Such a corpus would include data from all the world's languages, in a consistent structure, facilitating large-scale cross-linguistic processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SeedLing: Building and Using a Seed corpus for the Human Language Project

Emerson

Tan²,

Fertmann³

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

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show abstract

“…In this paper, we have described the creation of SeedLing, a foundation text for a Universal Corpus, following the guidelines of 2011). To do this, we cleaned and standardised data from several multilingual data sources: ODIN, Omniglot, the UDHR, Wikipedia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ideally, we should encode this information explicitly in a Universal Corpus, assigning a unique identifier to each morpheme (instead of, or in addition to each word). Indeed, Haspelmath (2011) argues that there is no cross-linguistically valid definition of word, which undermines the central position of words in the proposed data structure.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only a fraction of the world's languages are well documented, fewer have machine-readable resources, and fewer again have resources with linguistic annotations (Maxwell and Hughes, 2006) -so the time to work on compiling these resources is now. Several years ago, 2011) posed the challenge of building a Universal Corpus, naming it the Human Language Project. Such a corpus would include data from all the world's languages, in a consistent structure, facilitating large-scale cross-linguistic processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

2014

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ii Preface Contemporary efforts to document the world's endangered languages-often going under the rubric of documentary linguistics-are dependent on the widespread availability of modern recording technologies, in particular digital audio and video recording devices and software to annotate the recordings that such devices produce. However, despite well over a decade of dedicated funding efforts aimed at the documentation of endangered languages, the technological landscape that supports the work of those involved in this research remains fragmented, and the promises of new technology remain largely unfulfilled. Moreover, the efforts of computer scientists, on the whole, are mostly disconnected from the day-to-day work of documentary linguists, making it difficult for the knowledge of each group to inform the other. On the one hand, this deprives documentary linguists of tools making use of the latest research results to speed up the time-consuming task of describing an underdocumented language. On the other hand, it severely limits the ability of computational linguists to test their methods on the full range of world's linguistic diversity.Despite the concerns listed above, recent efforts do indicate that there is significant potential in collaboration between computational linguists (and other computer scientists) and linguists working on endangered languages. For instance, machine labeling and active learning can make the process of textual analysis for low-resource languages more efficient, and state-of-the-art tools in grammar engineering can be applied at a relatively low cost to new languages that are typologically divergent from those that primarily informed their design. Moreover, new models of data collection based on the ubiquity of lowcost, networkable devices with recording capabilities, such as smartphones, show the extent to which the barriers to collecting significant amounts of primary data have fallen in recent years, and it has similarly been found that the pairing of crowdsourcing and machine translation techniques can yield useful results for low resource languages in a short time frame. Research along these latter lines, in particular, indicates that computationally-driven advances in the documentation of the world's languages may need to rely as much on clever engineering and user interface solutions as on methods for processing language data developed within computational linguistics proper, in a manner parallel to efforts in other domains that have considered how new online services can be used to facilitate computational linguistic research.A different set of activities within the documentary linguistics community involving the increasing use of open standards for encoding language data is also significant in this regard. For instance, in the last decade, standardized XML formats have become more widely used to encode text annotations and lexical data. This facilitates the reuse of documentary materials. Even in the absence of the use of such standards, significant results have been a...

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Phrases Inside Words

Härtl,

Schlechtweg

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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The occurrence of phrases inside words poses a challenge for theorizing about the boundaries of the domain of word formation as well as the architecture of morphology in general. This entry focuses on phrasal compounds, such as over‐the‐fence gossip , as the most typical and productive set of data and examines the structural characteristics and configurational factors playing a role in phrasal compounding. In the first part of this entry, grammatical generalizations in the field of phrasal compounding will be addressed in some detail, laying out the various types of phrasal compounds identified in the literature and highlighting their properties from a typological vantage point. The second part, based on empirical reasoning, investigates configurational and relational aspects and links them to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic traits of phrasal compounds. Lastly, different models of the boundary between the word‐building component of language and syntax are outlined, with examples of how insights from the domain of phrasal compounding are implemented in different accounts. The entry closes with a short conclusion.

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The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax

Cited by 251 publications

References 40 publications

SeedLing: Building and Using a Seed corpus for the Human Language Project

SeedLing: Building and Using a Seed corpus for the Human Language Project

Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

Phrases Inside Words

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