Abstract
Theecology of languageis a concept introduced to clarify the relationships that hold between the use of language by people and the contexts in which those uses take place. Developing an effectiveecologyrequires access to large amounts of textual and lexical data. A number of projects are currently underway in the United States, in Europe, and in Japan to provide such materials in a form that allows them to be shared as community resources. This paper first briefly reviews a number of these efforts. Then it presents the results of a Workshop on Open Lexical and Textual Resources that was convened to discuss the value of amassing such collections. Consideration is subsequently given to types of corpora and procedures for designing and analyzing them. Three projects are singled out for special mention: (1) theText Encoding Initiative, which is formulating and disseminating guidelines for the preparation and dissemination of machine-readable texts for research and for use by the language industries; (2) theData Collection Initiative, which is acquiring and preparing a large text corpus to be made available for scientific research at cost and without royalties; and (3) theConsortium for Lexical Research, which is collecting and disseminating lexical resources and providing a clearinghouse for research results that make use of them. Understanding theecology of languageand analyzing the resources that contribute to it will prove increasingly important for electronic document delivery.
An earlier version of this paper appeared inProceedings of the International Workshop on Electronic Dictionaries, EDR TR-031, February 1991, Japan Electronic Dictionary Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan, 10–22.
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Walker, D.E. (1994). The Ecology of Language. In: Zampolli, A., Calzolari, N., Palmer, M. (eds) Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker. Linguistica Computazionale, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_19
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