AGGREGATION: Automatic Generation of Grammars for Endangered Languages from Glosses and Typological Information [ctn, ing, inh]

世界上的语言多样性正在以惊人的速度减少，而且没有足够的资源（训练有素的实地语言学家或为他们提供的资金）在所有濒危语言消失之前记录它们。因此，迫切需要软件工具来支持现场语言学家的效率。该项目将开发软件工具，通过合并两种类型的资源来帮助记录濒危语言：由语言学家整理的语言示例集合和称为语法矩阵的跨语言计算语法资源。其结果将是一个系统，用于根据现场语言学家收集和注释的数据创建机器可读或实现的语法。实现的语法可以在几个方面为濒危的语言文档做出贡献：语法本身提供了非常丰富的资源，允许语言学家以通常在散文描述中无法达到的精确度探索分析。此外，实现的语法可以用来创建树库，即与句法和语义结构相关的话语集合。创建树库的过程可以为现场语言学家提供关于当前分析未涵盖的语言数据方面的重要反馈。由此产生的树库可用于创建进一步的计算工具，也是语言类型学定性和定量工作的丰富可比数据来源，以计算可处理的方式在实际话语中建立更高层次的语言抽象。虽然构建实现的语法通常不在现场语言学项目的范围内，但现场语言学家确实经常创建注释翻译文本（称为“IGT”）的示例集，这些示例集封装了广泛的语言分析结果。该项目将进一步开发从IGT中提取类型化信息的计算方法，就像RiPLes项目（Xia & Lewis 2007, Lewis & Xia 2008）所开创的那样，并将这些信息与语法矩阵项目（Bender et al 2002, 2010）产生的跨语言资源相结合，为濒危语言创建实现的语法。美国计算机信息科学与工程理事会的信息与智能系统司为该奖项提供资金，作为其支持濒危语言文档计算工具和方法开发的承诺的一部分。

The world's linguistic diversity is diminishing at an alarming rate, and there are not enough resources (trained field linguists or funding for them) to document all the endangered languages before they are gone. Thus there is a critical need for software tools to support the efficiency of field linguists. This project will develop software tools to assist in the documentation of endangered languages by merging two types of resources: Collections of linguistic examples curated by linguists and a cross-linguistic computational grammar resource, called the Grammar Matrix. The result will be a system for creating machine-readable, or implemented, grammars from data collected and annotated by field linguists.Implemented grammars can contribute to endangered language documentation in several ways: The grammars themselves provide a very rich resource, allowing linguists to explore analyses at a level of precision not usually achieved in prose descriptions. Furthermore, implemented grammars can be used to create treebanks, that is, collections of utterances associated with syntactic and semantic structures. The process of creating the treebank can provide important feedback to the field linguist about aspects of the linguistic data not covered by current analyses. The resulting treebanks can be used to create further computational tools and are also a rich source of comparable data for qualitative and quantitative work in linguistic typology, grounding higher-level linguistic abstractions in actual utterances in a computationally tractable fashion.While building an implemented grammar is typically not within the scope of a field linguistics project, field linguists do routinely create collections of examples of glossed, translated text (called "IGT"), which encapsulate the result of extensive linguistic analysis. This project will further develop computational methods for extracting typological information from IGT like those pioneered by the RiPLes project (Xia & Lewis 2007, Lewis & Xia 2008) and combine that information with the cross-linguistic resource produced by the Grammar Matrix project (Bender et al 2002, 2010) to create implemented grammars for endangered languages.The Division of Information & Intelligent Systems of the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering is funding this award as part of its commitment to support the development of computational tools and methods for the documentation of endangered languages.