Collaborative Research: OLAC: Accessing the World's Language Resources

语言资源是语言文献和语言学研究的基础。它们包括文本和录音等主要研究对象，词典和语法等研究成果，以及软件工具和交换标准等使能技术。这些资源越来越多地以数字形式保存和分发。虽然语言资源已经开始在网络上激增，但它们往往很难或不可能找到和重用。在这个合作研究项目中，宾夕法尼亚大学的Mark Liberman博士和Steven Bird博士以及应用语言学研究生院的加里西蒙斯博士将通过新的研究来解决这个问题，以增强开放语言档案社区（OLAC）的数字基础设施。OLAC提供了一套标准的语言资源描述符和一个门户，允许用户使用一次搜索同时查询数十种语言档案。 然而，OLAC目前的覆盖范围只是冰山一角。该项目的目的是通过大幅度增加拉丁美洲和加勒比语言办公室目录的覆盖范围和使用拉丁美洲和加勒比语言办公室搜索服务，大大改善语言学家和更广泛的利益群体对语言资源的访问。该项目将通过两个主要活动领域这样做：制定指导方针和服务，鼓励语言档案遵循最佳通用做法，通过OLAC促进语言资源发现，该项目将通过开发一种在线服务，为语言学家提供一种语言学领域的广泛影响。访问世界上数千种语言的资源。但其影响将远远超出语言学界。访问这些语言资源将有助于技术人员努力使信息技术与每种语言一起工作，而不仅仅是少数几种语言。它还将使教育工作者、学生和广大社会成员能够获得展示世界语言多样性的丰富材料。获取语言资源的另一个受众是世界上所有语言的实际使用者。就濒危语言而言，获得语言资源是语言振兴进程中的一项重要资产。该项目还将有助于倡导广泛使用ISO 639-3，这是一项新通过的标准，提供了精确识别过去和现在的7 500种已知人类语言的代码。这将鼓励对目前的编目做法进行改革，因为目前的编目做法是以承认不到400种语文的早期国际标准化组织标准为基础的，并将开始帮助世界各地的主要知识库适当处理语文多样性问题的进程。

Language resources are the bread and butter of language documentation and linguistic investigation. They include the primary objects of study such as texts and recordings, the outputs of research such as dictionaries and grammars, and the enabling technologies such as software tools and interchange standards. Increasingly, these resources are maintained and distributed in digital form. Although language resources have begun to proliferate on the web, they are often difficult or impossible to locate and reuse. In this collaborative research project, Drs. Mark Liberman and Steven Bird of the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Gary Simons of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics will address this problem through new research to enhance the digital infrastructure of the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). OLAC provides a standard set of language resource descriptors and a portal that permits users to query dozens of language archives simultaneously using a single search. However, the current coverage of OLAC is only the tip of the iceberg. The aim of the project is to greatly improve access to language resources for linguists and the broader communities of interest, by achieving an order-of-magnitude increase in the coverage of the OLAC catalog and in the use of OLAC search services. The project will do so through two main areas of activity: developing guidelines and services that encourage language archives to follow best common practices that will facilitate language resource discovery through OLAC, and developing services to bridge from the resource catalogs of the library and web domains to the OLAC catalog.The project should have a broad impact across the field of linguistics by developing an online service that gives linguists access to resources for the thousands of languages in the world. But the impact will extend well beyond the linguistics community. Access to these language resources will assist technologists who are endeavoring to make information technologies work with every language, not just a select few. It will also permit educators, students and members of society at large to access a wealth of materials that demonstrate the full range of linguistic diversity in the world. Yet another audience for access to language resources are the actual speakers of all the languages of the world. In the case of endangered languages, access to language resources is a critical asset in the process of language revitalization. The project will also serve to advocate the widespread use of ISO 639-3, a newly adopted standard that provides codes for precisely identifying the 7,500 known human languages, past and present. This will encourage reform in current cataloging practice which is based on an earlier ISO standard that recognizes fewer than 400 languages, and begin the process of helping the major storehouses of knowledge around the world to deal appropriately with linguistic diversity.