Many a little makes a mickle - infrastructure component reuse for a massively multilingual linguistic study

• We present ongoing work aiming at turning the linguistic material available in Grierson’s classical Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) into a digital language resource, a database suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations of the languages of South Asia and studies relating to language typology and contact linguistics. The project has two concrete main aims: (1) to conduct a linguistic investigation of the claim that South Asia constitutes a linguistic area; (2) to develop state-of-the-art language technology for automatically extracting the relevant information from the text of the LSI. In this presentation we focus on how, in the first part of the project, a number of existing research infrastructure components provided by Swe-Clarin, the Swedish CLARIN consortium, have been ‘recycled’ in order to allow the linguists involved in the project to quickly orient themselves in the vast LSI material, and to be able to provide input to the language technologists designing the tools for information extraction from the descriptive grammars.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

corpus infrastructure

lexicon infrastructure

Swe-Clarin

large-scale comparative linguistics

linguistic database

language typology

areal linguistics

genetic linguistics

South Asian languages

language technology

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)