1. What Linguists Want (we think) Helen Aristar Dry & Anthony Aristar LINGUIST List & E-MELD

2. Language Documentation Used Research: Historical / comparative Ling Typology Language description Phonology & phonetics Syntax Psycholinguistics Discourse Analysis Anthropological linguistics Ethnomusicology Teaching of all of the above

3. So they want Access Central index of available material that supports flexible searching Ability to preview material Clear indication of access rights Fast permissions (24-hour turnaround) Stability Cited versions of resources still available Assembled sub-corpora available for a specified period of time, e.g., for the duration of a course

4. Ease of use Single interface — things work the same way in different archives (hard to misunderestimate the technical skill of academics) Registration that persists—i.e., they don’t have to keep filling out registration forms These desiderata addressed in Scenarios 4 and 5

5. And they would like Ability to manipulate the data To annotate corpus & share annotations with co-researchers To track their own annotations & additions (as opposed to those of others) To use a concordance program or other text processing program on the corpus To extract relevant portions of texts and create a sub-sub-corpus; to share this sub- corpus with co-researchers or students

6. They would REALLY like Ability to identify resources by searching for linguistic structures, e.g. Morphosyntactic categories (classifiers) Morphosyntactic features (paucal) Phonetic features (nasalization)* Supersegmentals (tone)* E.g. to search, not just the metadata, but the annotations and transcriptions of the archived material. *transcriptions, not sound — though search by sound would be even better

7. Structures central to: Research: Historical / comparative Ling Typology Language description Phonology & phonetics Syntax Teaching of all of the above

8. Want to answer Qs like: Do all IE languages have a contrast between voiced and unvoiced consonants? Which languages have a distinction between trial and paucal number? Where can I find examples of voiceless nasals (e.g., for a phonology problem)?

9. Need to search for… Morphemes representing morphosyntactic categories and features Phonetic segments Co-occurrences of segments, categories, & features

10. Need to search by Language families and subgroups Feature classes (e.g. “stops”, not [ b ] ) Morphosyntactic concepts (not just terminology, as this varies)

11. Requires enhanced Documentation Meta-information Search tools

12. Documentation Complete & transparent phonetic transcription Detailed & transparent morphosyntactic annotation Unambiguous language identification & classification

13. Meta-Information Unambiguous language identification system (language codes) Language classification system, organizing languages into families and subgroups Structured (graphic) taxonomy of phonetic features

14. Meta-Information Structured taxonomy of morphosyntactic categories and features (concepts and definitions) Lists of morphosyntactic terminology in use by various groups Mapping of the different terminology sets to the concepts and definitions

15. Search tools that can Interpret meta-information Use it to construct intelligent searches Search Annotation & Transcription OR Language profiles OR Annotation indexes

16. What we have New Documentation Audio / video recordings w/ translation Phonetic transcription Little morphosyntactic annotation (sometimes) Legacy documentation Detailed morphosyntactic annotation Complete phonetic transcription Non-transparent (idiosyncratic) markup Inaccessible format (e.g., paper)

17. What we have Meta-information Ontology of morphosyntactic concepts (GOLD —and others?) Terminology sets (DatCat Registry) Ontology of phonetic features Language codes & associated family trees (Ethnologue based)

18. What we have Search Prototype search of phonetic transcription using ontology of phonetic features, e.g. “Find all voiceless stops.” Steps toward search of morphosyntactic features: Language profiles which give the morphosyntactic categories and features used in a language (in XML) Conversion path for mapping idiosyncratic markup to the GOLD ontology (metaschemas + XSLT) Converting GOLD compliant markup into RDF for searching via semantic web

19. What we have: Tools For ontology-based morphosyntactic annotation OntoElan (MPI’s Elan + ontology-based terminology mapper) OntoGloss (ontology-aware stand-off annotation of web documents) For creating language profiles FIELD

20. What we need Comprehensive, integrated system that supports this kind of searching “Architecture, not just tools”