Documenting resources
The assignment
The point of this exercise is to scour library and online resources for everything you can find about a language.
Generally, there are five main categories of resources that we're interested in for a given language:
- computational resources (spell checkers, orthography converters, speech recognition software),
- dictionaries/phrasebooks/glossaries (multilingual and monolingual, online and paper),
- grammatical descriptions (theoretical and pædagogical),
- scientific works (papers, books, websites), and
- corpora (any collection of authentic text, linguistically annotated or not)
Your task is to find any resources possible, categorise them appropriately, provide a short description, list licenses, and work to obtain any resources that are not immediately available that would appear to be useful. You will submit your work by creating a page on the wiki.
In terms of finding resources, check the hints under Places to look for corpora. Basically, use general search engines, library search engines (like Tripod and WorldCat), scholarly article databases, references mentioned in less useful materials (like Wikipedia articles), and even emailing linguists who may have done some work on the language or people identifying as speakers of the language (people who grew up speaking the language, anthropologists, etc.).
In terms of categorisation, your top-level headings can be the five categories listed above, or whatever makes sense. You can look at some resource categorisation pages that already exist on the Apertium wiki for ideas: Kazakh, Farsi, Aromanian.
describe
Specify licenses for anything you think could be useful to take text from. For example, if there's an electronic dictionary, it may be useful to extract all the words from it, but the license may not allow for that. Other examples include example sentences in grammar books and academic publications and authentic texts in the language. Licenses will typically range from all rights reserved (most physically published material) to public domain (almost anything on Project Gutenberg), and there's a lot in between (anything on wikipedia, wiktionary, etc.). Copyrighted materials can be used for evaluation, but may not be released or distributed—though the copyright holder may be contactable and may be amenable to you using it for this class or even releasing annotated forms of it (contact early, contact often!).
obtain
submit
