Querying Linguistic Databases

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Mark Liberman and Dr. Steven Bird will lead a team conducting three years of research on data models and query languages for linguistic databases. The project will develop relational and XML data models for linguistic databases combining annotated recordings, comparative wordlists, data tabulations, interlinear texts, syntactic trees, ontologies of descriptive terms, and links between all these types. High-level user interfaces will support query-by-example and online analytical processing, permitting linguists to select appropriate language data, integrate data from multiple sources, transform the structure of the data, add new annotations in collaboration with others, and convert it all to suitable formats for archiving and for use in research and teaching. Describing and analyzing human languages depends on being able to manage large databases of annotated text and recorded speech. The size and complexity of these databases promises to bring unprecedented depth and breadth to empirical linguistic research. However, this promise will not be fulfilled until language scientists can readily access and manipulate the data. This project will apply recent research in databases to linguistics, develop a linguistic query language, and deploy it in a variety of open-source tools for creating, managing, analyzing, and displaying annotated linguistic databases. By making rich data re-usable, the research will open the way to a deeper and broader understanding of the world's languages.