Linguistic Databases

Linguistic Databases explains the increasing use of databases in linguistics. The enormous potential in linguistic data—billions of utterances and messages daily—has been difficult to exploit. Data must be archived and organized. Many linguists have had to concentrate on introspective data with its inevitable blinders toward frequency, variation, and naturalness. Applications of linguistics have been handicapped. This volume explores the potential advantages of database applications to linguistics.

Databases not only store large amounts of data, but also impose an organization in data, which facilitates access for researchers and applications developers. Linguistics Databases reports on database activities in phonetics, phonology, lexicography and syntax, comparative grammar, second-language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork and language pathology. The book presents the specialized problems of multi-media (especially audio) and multilingual texts, including those in exotic writing systems. Implemented solutions are discussed. The opportunities to use existing, minimally structured text repositories are presented.

John Nerborne is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Chair of Humanities Computing Groningen.

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