Current events

The GOLD ontology has been off line for a while now. TypeCraft had linked annotation tags directly to GOLD concepts. We have now removed these links from our POS and Gloss lists.

--Dorothee Beermann 15:27, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

We have worked very hard and ,,,

The release of TypeCraft 2.0 is right around the corner

In this presentation I will describe three areas of research in which I am presently involved in my work at the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The 20 Native languages of Alaska area are all deeply endangered, and this fact affects the structure of our research program. Advancement of language documentation is crucial, as is the creation of reference materials that serve pedagogical as well as academic purposes. The Alaskan Athabascan Grammar Database, currently in design phase with three languages represented, is a project created in response to these needs, developing in collaboration with Olga Lovick and Sebastian Nordhoff. Exploration of linguistic diversity drives the study of prosody and communication, and this has pushed us to develop new “field-lab” methodologies. Not least, the priorities of language communities themselves must be respected. Following the direction of Athabascan elders, I and others have undertaken the study of language in relation to music, an area that promises to inform both musicology and linguistics.

11th September 2013,

Language Documentation and ethnography,

NICHOLAS THIERBERGER, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Language documentation and ethnography In this talk I will discuss ways in which language documentation is aligning linguistic methods with ethnography in its interest in the meanings encapsulated in language. Descriptive linguistics arose out of the structuralist tradition and has mainly been concerned with writing linguistic analyses of narrowly focused phenomena and, occasionally, of lesser-known languages. In the recent past a theory of language documentation has developed, partly in reaction to the abstraction of, for example, the minimalism of Chomsky and his followers, but also in response to the needs of people we work with in the field. Language Documentation can be seen as delivering a postmodern linguistics by acknowledging the partiality of the data on which an analysis is based, and in explicitly inserting the linguist into the process of recording, annotating and preparing the corpus for scrutiny by others. It also emphasises the presentation of the context of an utterance in contrast with the earlier practice of basing a theoretical point on a decontextualised example sentence. All of this can be seen as increasing self-reflexivity and contingency in linguistic analysis. At the same time it is building a ‘modern’ set of data that can be used in a scientific method of data gathering, hypothesis development and testing and analysis and in which critical aspects are: replication of analyses, external review of collections and processes, and data recording and sharing. These are decidedly not postmodern methods. In this context I will present the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) as an example of humanities scholars taking responsibility for building the necessary infrastructure to curate research outputs and primary materials. In this way the records can be cited and reused, both by researchers and by the speakers and others who want to access them. We must also advocate new methods and train practitio

...... Language documentation and ethnography ......

DOWNLOAD THIEBERGER'S LECTURER

User survey

At the end of January 2013, the TypeCraft project had ask a group of users to help evaluate the TypeCraft application by completing an online survey.

TypeCraft has different user groups, individual users, student users and projects. We included representatives of each of these user groups into the survey.

We had ask 27 users and received 10 answers which is a good response rate of 37%. We again would like to thank all participants.

A summary of the survey is accessible here: Download survey results as powerpoint presentation.

--Dorothee Beermann 20:58, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Akan corpus work

Most of the Akan corpus is back online. We still work on consolidating some of the texts.

--Dorothee Beermann 20:58, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

The TypeCraft Akan corpus consisting of 51 texts is at present not accessible to the general public. This is due to work with corpus consistency.

--Dorothee Beermann 10:33, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Events 2011-12

2nd Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation

September 10 - 13, 2012

The 2nd Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation addresses important issues in Language Documentation. Our focus is on Grammar Writing and Tools and we will have a special lecture on Linguistic Anthropology. In addition to presentations, we feature hands-on classes in the use of Elan and TypeCraft.

For more information follow the link in the heading.

Extended developers meeting

This year's first developers meeting takes place in Trondheim, Mai, 8-11.

Graduate Courses

University of Education in Winneba, Ghana.

Lelada Graduate Course January 2011, UoE, Winneba.

This fall the University of Education at Winneba, Ghana will offer graduate courses in linguists, covering subjects in Phonology, Morphology and Syntax.

The courses will be held on the Winneba campus and will run over 2 weeks at the end of October and in the first week of November 2011. In addition workshops in digital text and speech annotation will be held.

More information will be available here at the end of August 2011.

Summer School of Linguistics at Makerere University, Uganda

August 2011

During the Summer School that took place from 1st -13th August at Makerere University, linguists from Makerere University , Nkozi University, Kyambogo University , University of Zürich and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology get together to discuss different linguistic approaches and participate in hands-on classes on different digital tools for Language Description and Documentation.

Download the Summer School Poem by Florence Kengoma

You find the photo gallery of the Summer School here. Please add some more pictures! :)

Course descriptions and downloadable class presentations can be found on the following page: Summer_School_of_Linguistics_at_Makerere_University,_Uganda

TypeCraft - Poster and Presentation, June 2011, Portland, USA

Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities

at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language.Portland,Oregon,USA, June 2011.

e-Research for Linguists

Abstract:

e-Research explores the possibilities offered by ICT for science and technology. Its goal is to allow a better access to computing power, data and library resources. In essence e-Research is all about cyberstructure and being connected in ways that might change how we perceive scientific creation. The present work advocates open access to scientific data for linguists and language experts working within the Humanities. By describing the modules of an online application, we would like to outline how a linguistic tool can help the linguist. Work with data, from its creation to its integration into a publication is not rarely perceived as a chore. Given the right tools however, it can become a meaningful part of the linguistic investigation. The standard format for linguistic data in the Humanities is Interlinear Glosses. As such they represent a valuable resource even though linguists tend to disagree about the role and the methods by which data should influence linguistic exploration (Lehmann, 2004). In describing the components of our system we focus on the potential that this tool holds for real-time datasharing and continuous dissemination of research results throughout the life-cycle of a linguistic project.

Graduate level intensive courses on Language Description and Analysis Winneba January 10 - 20, 2011

The University of Education Winneba, Ghana.

University of Education Winneba

You find a course picture and some of the teaching material at the following page Graduate_Course_in_Linguistics,_University_of_Education,_Winneba,_Ghana.

The Department of Linguistics Education of the University of Education, Winneba offers 2 graduate level intensive courses on Language Description and Analysis in January 2011, one in morpho-syntax and one in computational methods.

The course in morpho-syntax has the title:

Introduction into Lexical-Functional Grammar. The course reviews the basic principles of Generative Grammar with emphasis on the framework Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), and gives practical training in applying the theory and its formalism to language data, predominantly from Ghanaian languages.

Instructor: Prof. Lars Hellan, NTNU, Norway.

Time: Jan 10, 11, 12, 13, with sessions in the morning and afternoon, including training sessions.

The course in computational methods has the title:

Language Description and Analysis - digital linguistic tools and their use.

The course will focus on creating and managing of small research corpus and text annotation. The participants will learn to start a linguistic research project in the domain of language documentation and learn about linguistic methodology and themes in language documentation.

Instructor: Prof. Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway.

Time: Jan 17, 18, 19, 20, with sessions in the morning and afternoon, including training sessions.

The course is open to graduate students and staff from all Ghanaian institutions involved in Linguistics. All prospective participants in the course should register with the Faculty of Languages Education from today through January 8, 2011.

Previous Events

TypeCraft developers' Meeting, Trondheim, Late October/November 2010

The TypeCraft developers' meeting took place at the beginning of November. You probably have already noticed that a new box has appeared on your TypeCraft navigation bar. The *TypeCraft corpus --> New Corpus* special wiki page will help you to create a research corpus. Using a wiki template format it will allow you to encode metadata for different text types. Please try this out!

As usual we will first test the wiki-corpus function in TypeCraft classes. Think of the corpus wiki pages as a first step towards an integration of annotated texts with a research corpus. Often we want a repository of texts of different types, such as newspaper article, short stories, transcribed audi-material, but we only want to annotated parts of the material. Annotated part of texts should be related to the source texts. This will be possible in the near future, but first we would like your feed-back:

How much text and what type of texts would you like to store?
What are your ideas about the relation between annotated parts of text and source text?
Is it feasible to work with Infoboxes to encode metadata?

At present the corpus texts that you create are visible to the general public, something that you should take into consideration when you test the new TC-wiki corpus interface.

Notice also that we added automatic transliteration of Telugu text to the system. When inspecting texts from Telugu in the TC-Text Editor you find *Phrase View translit* as one of the options on the drop-down menu of *Phrases*. Enjoy!

COLING 2010

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Demo Session 1 - Language Processing, Data Annotation

Cloud Computing for Linguists

Dorothee Beermann, Pavel Mihaylow

The Trondheim Workshop in Language Description and Documentation

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim September 6th - 9th, 2010

For more information follow the link above.

Mini-Workshop on TC, organized by the Relikwa Team,

University of Cocody (Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire),

Dates: 14th (10°30'- 15°30') and 15th (9° - 14°) January 2010.

Place: At the "Wireless Place"!

Contact: Joseph BOGNY (ILA, Bureau 4,joseph.bogny@ltml.ci).

Digital methods for speech and text processing,

NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Institute for Language and Communication Studies, Spring Semester 2010.

Dates: Semesterstart: 13th January 2010.

Place: Dragvoll, Building 4,level5, LINGLAB

Contact: Wim van Dommelen and Dorothee Beermann

Short Course Description

This course gives an introduction to the use of digital methods for processing spoken and written speech. As main tools for speech analysis the Praat and Typecraft software will be used. The analysis involves transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), segmentation and annotation of speech recordings. Text material will be analyzed morphologically and words and morphemes will be annotated using several tiers of annotation. The build-up and management of small corpora and develop and understanding of standards for text analysis and their implementation is part of the pensum.

16 - 19 November 2009, Toolbox-TypeCraft workshop at the University of Ghana, Legon, Department of Linguistics. For more information go to the TCwiki page --> Technology for Linguistics. For details about the recently held Toolbox-TypeCraft workshop, go to Toolbox-TypeCraft_Workshop_Legon_2009.

The workshop consist of a series of separate sessions focusing on computational lexicography and interlinear glossing and digital language documentation on-line.

October 29th - November 1st 2009, Fall developers' meeting in Trondheim, Norway.

Bugs fixed:

Login expiration -- login shouldn't expire any more unless you are idle for more than an hour.
File upload -- updating existing uploaded files and deleting uploaded files works now.

New:

MediaWiki updated to the latest stable version, 1.15.1.

Upcoming goodies:

New search interface (to use Google Web Toolkit)
Offline client (downloadable from our wiki)
Alternative ways of exporting data to MS Word and OpenOffice.org
Integration with GOLD
New online editor (again Google Web Toolkit)

TypeCraft participates in a workshop on a Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics:

Cyberling 2009: Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics

Workshop on linguistic Tools (existing and future "killer apps")

Friday 17 July — Sunday 19 July, Berkeley University, USA.

Small Tools for Cross-Linguistic Research. Workshop at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. June 15th - 16th 2009.

Dorothee Beermann, Pavel Mihaylov. TypeCraft - linguistic data and knowledge sharing. - Open Access in linguistic methodology.

April 15 - April 22 2009 TYPECRAFT DEVELOPERS' MEETING

Language Technologies for African Languages, March 31 2009, Athens, Greece.

Workshop at the annual meeting of the European Association for Computational Linguistics

Dorothee Beermann, Pavel Mihaylov Interlinear glossing and its role in theoretical and descriptive studies of African and other lesser-documented languages

TypeCraft at the International Student Festival - ISFITovation in Trondheim, 26 february 2009

When: 26 February 2009, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm Where: Realfagbygget, R7, Gloshaugen campus, NTNU. Chairman: Arne Sølvberg, Dean, Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, NTNU

Typecraft, Software for minority languages Lulesamisk and Edo. Ota Ogie and Ass. prof. Dorothee Beermann, Department of Language and Communication Studies

University of Surrey, Institute of Advanced Studies Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology, 9 January 2009 - 10 January 2009

Dorothee Beermann: From interlinear glossing to standard annotation.

23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, October 1, 2008, Uppsala University

Dorothee Beermann and Pavel Mihaylov: TypeCraft: Language annotation for human beings

SEPT 2 - SEPT 5 2008 TYPECRAFT DEVELOPERS' MEETING

COLING 2008 Manchester, August 24, 2008

Lars Hellan, NTNU: From Grammar-Independent Construction Enumeration to Lexical Types in Computational Grammars at COLING Workshop Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks 2008 (GEAF 2008).

WALC 2008 - July 28 - August 3, 2008

Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, University of Ghana. The Construction label project: a tool for typological study.

Completed Projects

2008

Annotation and Documentation of LuleSámi The project was a cooperation between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and he LuleSámi Center Árran