US-Turkey Cooperative Research: A Unified Electronic Lexicon of Turkish

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

0002099 Inkelas Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Professor Sharon Inkelas, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, California and Professor Kemal Oflazer, Department of Computer Engineering at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan on utilizing the results of their two independent research projects at Berkeley and at Bilkent to develop a grand, unified electronic lexicon of Turkish language that will be greater than the sum of the two independent projects. During this collaboration they will decide on mutual platforms, goals and implementation of the unified lexicon. The result will be a web-accessible database usable by linguists (phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, historical linguists), natural language processing researchers, and teachers and students of Turkish worldwide. Scope: Two expert teams, having produced successful, different but complementary prototypes, will now form a larger team with the goal of integrating their achievements in one large database. Researchers who work on various aspects of language in general and Turkish in particular will be provided with a rich source of data covering phonetic, phonological, morphological, textual and etymological information. The project is expected to integrate, and enhance dissemination, of information that was previously available piecemeal, and to widely scattered experts. The project will serve as a model for participation by other groups, in the preservation and dissemination of information of understudied languages. Two graduate students, one from UC Berkeley and one from Bilkent University will participate in the project. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.