Workshop: Development of Linguistic Linked open Data Resources for Collaborative Data-Intensive Research in the Language Sciences; University of Chicago, July 2015

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Sharing research data, essential to all science, is particularly challenging to Linguistics and the Language Sciences. How do children acquire language, any possible language or multiple languages, how does language acquisition and/or loss relate to brain development or degeneration? Fundamental questions such as these require consulting large and diverse sets of language data from many sources across different languages and situations and many different learners. Answering crucial questions such as these is essential to many social issues, such as those involving expanding multilingual populations in the US and across the world. However, language data currently exist in many different formats, in many independent heterogeneous databases with divergent annotation schemes, making its access by collaborating researchers or other users across different languages, disciplines or fields such as medicine or education, very difficult. In order to make large and diverse sets of language data accessible and interpretable, many conceptual and technical challenges must be met. This project convenes a workshop at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute consisting of an international set of scholars who are concerned with these challenges and working to confront them. The planned workshop will integrate European scholars from the Open Linguistics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation, with North and South American scholars, exploiting advances that have been made in Europe on the transformation of language resources into open (accessible to all) linked (relating each data item to others) data. It will address issues including development of computationally feasible annotation schemes, web interfaces, linkage technicalities, and principles of collaboration and sustainability. Scholars representing each of these areas will be represented. Researchers collaborating on the study of bilingualism and multilingualism in children will provide a test case, instantiating linked data needs. Graduate students will be integrated. Expected results include draft of a community-shared vision for the design, implementation, and sustainability of an infrastructure to make large amounts of data easier to share, available to students and researchers across countries and disciplines, and which can serve as a model for other areas of science. A collection of proceedings will be made available through the web.