Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases (the CLOUD Project)

在目前世界上使用的大约7,000种语言中，语言学家估计将近一半将在下个世纪内灭绝。 这些语言中很少有被很好地记录下来的，但在过去的二十年里，研究人员一直在与各种濒危语言的使用者合作，以保护这些语言所拥有的丰富数据。 这些数据对于语言教育工作和对世界语言令人难以置信的多样性的语言研究来说是无价的。 然而，不幸的是，这些数据中的大部分都存在于这些研究人员的个人文件中，对语言感兴趣的其他人无法访问，并且无法以使数据易于共享的形式进行访问。 COULD项目（清理、组织和统一语言数据库）是加拿大大学（Concordia和麦吉尔）和哈佛大学之间的一个合作项目，为这个问题提供了一个解决方案。该项目的主要目标是为语言数据创建一种新的通用数据格式，集中在线存储这些数据，以及一套相关的在线工具，使世界各地的用户能够更轻松，更准确地收集，保存和共享语言数据。该项目将有助于将以前收集的数据整合到这种新格式中，使第二语言学习者、希望保护其语言遗产的社区成员以及其他语言和文化爱好者以及其他研究人员能够访问这些大量的语言数据（目前仅由专家使用）。 就更广泛的影响而言，该项目对那些如果年轻一代不学习就有可能永远消失的语言也特别重要。对保存社区语言感兴趣的非语言学家（特别是社区本身的成员）将能够使用该项目的在线工具来记录他们的语言，而无需依赖专家。此外，该项目的课程制作应用程序将使用户能够制作学习材料，这是许多濒危语言所缺乏的，并将支持社区努力向年轻一代教授自己的语言。

Of the approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, linguists estimate that nearly half will be extinct within the next century. Very few of these languages have been well documented, but for the past two decades researchers have been working with speakers of a variety of endangered languages to preserve the rich data these languages possess. This data is invaluable for language education efforts and for linguistic research on the incredible diversity of the world's languages. Unfortunately, however, much of this data resides in the personal files of these researchers, inaccessible to others interested in the language, and not in a form that enables the data to be shared easily. The COULD project (Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases), a partnership between Canadian universities (Concordia and McGill) and Harvard University, is offering a solution to this problem. The main goal of the project is to create a new universal data format for language data, centralized online storage for this data, and a set of related online tools which will allow users all over the world to collect, preserve, and share language data more easily and more accurately. The project will assist with the integration of previously collected data into this new format, enabling this vast amount of linguistic data (currently only being used by specialists) to be accessible to second language learners, community members who would like to preserve their linguistic heritage, and other language and culture enthusiasts, in addition to other researchers. With respect to broader impacts, the project is also of particular importance for those languages that are in threat of disappearing forever if the younger generations do not learn them. Non-linguists interested in preserving a community's language (especially members of the community itself) will be able to use the project's online tools to document their language without relying on experts. In addition, the project's lesson creation application will enable users to create learning materials, which are lacking for many endangered languages, and will support communities in their efforts to teach their language to younger generations.