computer science

Language resource

Language resource is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Language resource rather than just read about it. In short: In linguistics and language technology, a language resource is a "[composition] of linguistic material used in the construction, improvement and/or evaluation of language processing applications, (...) in language and language-mediated research studies and applications." According to Bird & Simons (2003), this includes data, i.e. "any information that documents or describes a language, such as a published monograph…

Key takeaways

Language resource belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Language resource to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Language resource from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

In linguistics and language technology, a language resource is a "[composition] of linguistic material used in the construction, improvement and/or evaluation of language processing applications, (...) in language and language-mediated research studies and applications." According to Bird & Simons (2003), this includes

data, i.e. "any information that documents or describes a language, such as a published monograph, a computer data file, or even a shoebox full of handwritten index cards. The information could range in content from unanalyzed sound recordings to fully transcribed and annotated texts to a complete descriptive grammar", tools, i.e., "computational resources that facilitate creating, viewing, querying, or otherwise using language data", and advice, i.e., "any information about what data sources are reliable, what tools are appropriate in a given situation, what practices to follow when creating new data". The latter aspect is usually referred to as "best practices" or "(community) standards". In a narrower sense, language resource is specifically applied to resources that are available in digital form, and then, "encompassing (a) data sets (textual, multimodal/multimedia and lexical data, grammars, language models, etc.) in machine readable form, and (b) tools/technologies/services used for their processing and management".

Typology As of May 2020, no widely used standard typology of language resources has been established (current proposals include the LREMap, METASHARE, and, for data, the LLOD classification). Important classes of language resources include

data lexical resources, e.g., machine-readable dictionaries, linguistic corpora, i.e., digital collections of natural language data, linguistic data bases such as the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data collection, tools linguistic annotations and tools for creating such annotations in a manual or semiautomated fashion (e.g., tools for annotating interlinear glossed text such as Toolbox and FLEx, or other language documentation tools), applications for search and retrieval over such data (corpus management systems), for automated annotation (part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, semantic parsing, etc.), metadata and vocabularies vocabularies, repositories of linguistic terminology and language metadata, e.g., MetaShare (for language resource metadata), the ISO 12620 data category registry (for linguistic features, data structures and annotations within a language resource), or the Glottolog database (identifiers for language varieties and bibliographical database).

Language resource publication, dissemination and creation A major concern of the language resource community has been to develop infrastructures and platforms to present, discuss and disseminate language resources. Selected contributions in this regard include:

a series of International Conferences on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), the European Language Resources Association (ELRA, EU-based), and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC, US-based), which represent commercial hosting and dissemination platforms for language resources, the Open Languages Archives Community (OLAC), which provides and aggregates language resource metadata, the Language Resources and Evaluation Journal (LREJ), the European Language Grid is a European platform for language technologies (eg services), data and resources. As for the development of standards and best practices for language resources, these are subject of several community groups and standardization efforts, including

ISO Technical Committee 37: Terminology and other language and content resources (ISO/TC 37), developing standards for all aspects of language resources, W3C Community Group Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data (BPMLOD), working on best practice recommendations for publishing language resources as Linked Data or in RDF, W3C Community Group Linked Data for Language Technology (LD4LT), working on linguistic annotations on the web and language resource metadata, W3C Community Group Ontology-Lexica (OntoLex), working on lexical resources, the Open Linguistics working group of the Open Knowledge Foundation, working on conventions for publishing and linking open language resources, developing the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), working on XML-based specifications for language resources and digitally edited text.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Language resource

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Language resource claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Language resource before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Language resource ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Language resource

In research: Language resource appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Language resource in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Language resource is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computational linguistics, Natural language processing, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Language resource outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Language resource in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Language resource means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Language resource out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Language resource in simple terms?

Why does Language resource matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Language resource?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Language resource.