ANU - CoEDL Linguistics Seminar: Benefits of Interlinear Glossed Texts for Computational and Documentary Linguistics, Sarah Moeller, 5 Mar

Australian National University, Outreach

Seminar: Benefits of Interlinear Glossed Texts for Computational and Documentary Linguistics

Speaker: Sarah Moeller, University of Colorado Boulder

When: 5 Mar 2021, 11am (AEDT)

Where: via zoom (please email CoEDL@anu.edu.au for zoom link invitation)

Abstract: 

One of the largest annotated linguistic resources available in many endangered or low-resource languages is interlinear glossed texts (IGT). IGT are a common documentary output that serve as a foundation for much descriptive work. As computational linguistics expands to a broader range of languages, it is encountering a dearth of annotated resources needed to train state-of-the-art supervised machine learning. Knowing the potential uses for IGT in computational linguistics and the problematic issues that arise in them might allow linguists working with endangered languages to receive greater benefit from computational methods. This talk will look at how IGT are being leveraged in computational research. It will explore the potential of such research to speed documentary work, assist linguistic research, and enhance language maintenance. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of issues that can make IGT difficult to use.