Workshop on Endangered Language Data Preservation: The Need for Standards, June 21-24, 2001, Santa Barbara, California

语言学专业人员面临着两个紧迫的情况：世界上的语言数量正在迅速减少，而由于网络技术的日益普及和成熟，将语言数据数字化的举措数量正在迅速增加。面对前者，后者可能看起来是一件纯粹的好事，但如果档案保管员、现场语言学家和语言工程师之间没有足够的合作，事情可能会出现两种情况。首先，语言数据数字化的共同标准可能永远不会达成一致；由此导致的存档做法和语言表达的差异将严重阻碍数据的获取、搜索和跨语言比较。其次，标准的制定可能没有最了解人类语言结构可能性范围的人的指导--对描述不佳的语言进行过田野调查的描述性语言学家。以西方知名语言为基础设计的元语言或元数据准则将不足以在面临广泛的语言损耗和损失的情况下对尽可能多的语言数据进行归档这一紧迫任务。如果语言档案要提供尽可能广泛的数据获取并以最有用的形式提供数据，就必须就档案基础设施的某些方面达成共识。这是与2001年美国语言学会暑期研究所联合举办的一个为期3天的研讨会的拟议主题，有经验的实地语言学家、计算语言学家和语言档案员将参加。讲习班的目的是将实地语言学家和计算语言学家带着两个主要目标聚集在一起：(1)就实地语言学家和计算语言学家预期在建立濒危语言数据档案方面面临的截然不同的挑战相互进行教育，以及(2)就档案基础设施的两个基本要素征求建议：文本标记和元数据。

Members of the linguistics profession are faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to digitize language data is rapidly multiplying as a result of the increasing availability and sophistication of web technology. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, field linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon; and the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be set without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages. Metalanguage or metadata guidelines which are designed on the basis of well-known western languages will not be adequate to the urgent task of archiving as much linguistic data as possible in the face of widespread language attrition and loss.If linguistic archives are to offer the widest possible access to the data and provide it in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. This is the proposed topic of a 3-day workshop which will be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America 2001 Summer Institute and will involve experienced field linguists, computational linguists, and language archivists. The objective of the workshop is to bring field linguists and computational linguists together with two primary goals: (1) to educate one other about the very different challenges field linguists and computational linguists anticipate in the establishment of an archive for endangered language data, and (2) to solicit recommendations about two essential elements of archive infrastructure: text markup and metadata.