Querying Linguistic Databases

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Mark Liberman博士和Steven Bird博士将领导一个团队，对语言数据库的数据模型和查询语言进行为期三年的研究。该项目将为语言数据库开发关系和可扩展标记语言数据模型，将注释记录、比较词表、数据表格、行间文本、句法树、描述性术语的本体论以及所有这些类型之间的联系结合起来。高级用户界面将支持逐例查询和在线分析处理，使语言学家能够选择适当的语言数据，整合来自多个来源的数据，转换数据的结构，与其他人合作添加新的注释，并将其全部转换为适合存档和用于研究和教学的格式。描述和分析人类语言取决于能够管理注释文本和录音语音的大型数据库。这些数据库的规模和复杂性有望为实证语言学研究带来前所未有的深度和广度。然而，在语言科学家能够方便地访问和操纵数据之前，这一承诺将不会实现。该项目将把最新的数据库研究应用到语言学中，开发一种语言查询语言，并将其部署在各种开源工具中，用于创建、管理、分析和显示带注释的语言数据库。通过使丰富的数据可重复使用，这项研究将为更深入、更广泛地理解世界上的语言开辟道路。

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.