Dia 13 de novembro 2009
8:15 – 9:30 Conferência de abertura: Steven Bird (University of Melbourne, Austrália; University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Corpus Linguistics and Language Preservation
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There is a pressing need to document the world's linguistic heritage
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while there is still time. The consequence of language shift is that
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many genres -- and many whole languages -- are quickly falling out of
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use. Digital technologies speed up the task, yet the work is not
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covering a sufficient number of languages, in sufficient depth, at a
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sufficient rate. What would it take to compile a million-word corpus
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consisting of speech recordings and transcriptions, for 5,000
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languages within the space of a decade?
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This presentation will describe a new approach to corpus creation
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called "basic oral language documentation" (BOLD). I will describe
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BOLD and report on a pilot study with Usarufa, a moribund language
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spoken by approximately 1200 people in the Eastern Highlands Province
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of Papua New Guinea. Local literacy teachers were trained in the use
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of digital voice recorders for capturing linguistic events, and then
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adding spoken transcriptions and interpretations into a language of
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wider communication. I will describe a variety of technical and
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sociological challenges, and speculate on how the BOLD methodology
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could be adopted for preserving the languages of Brazil.
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The presentation will also describe the Open Language Archives
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Community (OLAC), an international partnership of institutions and
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individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language
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resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for
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the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a
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network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and
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accessing such resources. The software services of OLAC will be
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demonstrated, with an emphasis on the languages of Brazil.
