India2011- Digital Linguistics

In October 2011, NTNU will arrange a week-long event, called India 2011, with India as the theme. The focus will be on broad cooperation

in culture, research, higher education and business.

The present arrangement between the University of Hyderabad and the Institute of Languages and

Communication Studies and the Institute of Modern Languages at NTNU has Indian languages as its focus.

The arrangement of several talks and workshops, announced here, is part of the NTNU's India week.

India is a continent of many languages. Ethnologue refers to 452 listed languages of India. The nation is not only rich in languages. Grounded on work dating back to Pāṇini, Indian linguistics has had a significant influence on the development of linguistics as we know it today.

Digital Language Description, Knowledge Representation and Formal Linguistics for Indic Languages

map of the languages of India

In a workshop on Digital Language Description, Knowledge Representation and Formal Linguistics, linguists from Hyderabad and Trondheim will work together on the representation and formalisation of some of the salient aspects of selected languages from the Dravidian, the Indo-Aryan and the Austro-Asiatic language families of India.

The workshop will take place in a digital communication environment. A group of linguists will work on qualitative language description and linguistic formalisation of Indian languages. Keynote talks addressing central issues in the digitisation and formalisation of Indic languages will be combined with group sessions dedicated to the documentation and formalisation of central Indic construction types. Legacy-data will be digitised and enriched by further layers of annotation. Results of the workshop will be made accessible online using software developed at NTNU.

The workshop has two sections:

[1] ‘Multilingual text processing, interlinear annotation and formalisation of Indic languages’

[2] ‘Grammatical construction types across Indian languages’

More about the theme and about the importance of combining linguistic description with digital Knowledge Representation, on the one hand, and formal approaches to language description on the other.

Keynote Talks

Several Keynote talks will address central issues in the digitisation and formalisation of Indic languages

Workshop [2] ‘Grammatical construction types across Indian languages’

Professor Hellan is...

Workshop [1] ‘Multilingual text processing, interlinear annotation and formalisation of Indic languages’

Using natural language processing tools and linguistic web-technology developed at University at Hyderabad and at NTNU, we will create small research corpora which we will annotate for salient linguistic properties with the goal of deriving Attribute Value Matrix Notations from these annotations.

Workshop talk Collaborative corpus creation - qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods

Dorothee Beermann is an assoc. professor at NTNU. Her fields of research are syntax and lexical semantics. She has specialised in the use of online data basing for Language Description and Language Documentation

more soon