An Empirical Evaluation of Annotation Practices in Corpora from Language Documentation

Kilu von Prince, Sebastian Nordhoff


Abstract
For most of the world’s languages, no primary data are available, even as many languages are disappearing. Throughout the last two decades, however, language documentation projects have produced substantial amounts of primary data from a wide variety of endangered languages. These resources are still in the early days of their exploration. One of the factors that makes them hard to use is a relative lack of standardized annotation conventions. In this paper, we will describe common practices in existing corpora in order to facilitate their future processing. After a brief introduction of the main formats used for annotation files, we will focus on commonly used tiers in the widespread ELAN and Toolbox formats. Minimally, corpora from language documentation contain a transcription tier and an aligned translation tier, which means they constitute parallel corpora. Additional common annotations include named references, morpheme separation, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, part-of-speech tags and notes.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.338
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2778–2787
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.338
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kilu von Prince and Sebastian Nordhoff. 2020. An Empirical Evaluation of Annotation Practices in Corpora from Language Documentation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2778–2787, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Evaluation of Annotation Practices in Corpora from Language Documentation (von Prince & Nordhoff, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.338.pdf