Difference between revisions of "Annotation of representative texts from Lule Sami"

Revision as of 19:28, 11 January 2009

TypeCraft in-depth annotation of representative texts in Lule Sami

The in-depth annotation of Lule Sami texts is a pilot study financed by the Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology . The project uses the TypeCraft database to store and retrieve linguistically annotated texts. Here and on the related pages Documenting Lule Sami and About Lule Sami, we report about the project. While the present page gives a general overview, Documenting Lule Sami deals with issues concerning the morpho-syntactic annotation of Lule Sami. About Lule Sami informs about the Lule Sami people and their language, as it is spoken on the Norwegian side of the Kjølen mountains. Under Lule Sami Online you find links to other sites related to the Lule Sami people, their language and their culture. A reference list can be found under Lule Sami Reference List.

SÁMI - SAMI - SAAMI

According to the Norwegian Sami Parliament, sáme is to be written Sami in English. The Árran Lule Sami Centre, which we consulted, follows this norm and so will we.

Who are we

The annotation project was led by Dorothee Beermann, associate professor at the Institute for Languages and Communication Studies at NTNU. Dorothee is a linguist and works mainly with formal syntax and lexical semantics. She planned and organized the project, customized the TypeCraft tag sets and worked throughout the project with the TypeCraft wiki. More about Dorothee's work can be found here .

The two annotators for the project, Kristin Lindbach and Svenn-Egil Knutsen live in the North of Norway while Dorothee lives in Trondheim in Mid-Norway. At the beginning it felt more natural for us to communicate by e-mail, sms and telephone, but in the course of the project, we started to use more and more the TCwiki to communicate. Parts of our discussion, for example about tags and annotation standards, you can find on the Documenting Lule Sami page and on the related discussion page. Interesting is also the discussion page for the article About Lule Sami, since also between us, some issues concerning the language and the Lule Sami people are still under discussion.

Both Kristin and Svenn-Egil have worked on securing the publication rights for the corpus of Lule Sami texts that this project has created on TypeCraft.

Svenn-Egil has worked mainly on the About Lule Sami page and on the unique graphical design of our pages. In a Lule Sami voice recording he talks about his life and growing-up as a Sami in Norway. [The recording will soon be available here (Dorothee 20:45, 13 December 2008 (CET))].

Kristin is responsible for the annotation of the texts. In-depth manual annotation is a time-consuming job, and she has spent many hours finding the appropriate glosses to describe the intricate properties of the Lule Sami morphology.

This annotation project is a pilot study, which gave us limited time and limited resources. Yet, we all feel that we made a good start.

In-depth annotation

The TypeCraft pilot study on Lule Sami has been financed by The Faculty of Humanities at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The project started in Mai 2008 and ended in December 2008. Its goal has been to create a small but representative corpus of Lule Sami texts, and to annotate these texts manually. Given the short duration of the study we will not be able to cover all of the texts that we selected for annotation. However, for some of the texts we have provided rich annotations on several tiers. Although construction level annotation is possible in TypeCraft, we have mainly restricted the annotation to the morphological level.

Although a small corpus, we have tried to cover a wide spectre of genres and a representative collection of cultural areas.

Available Lule Sami texts in TypeCraft is listed below, including both partially annotated and not yet annotated texts.