[open-linguistics] Linguistic glossaries

Mon Jun 10 14:29:22 UTC 2013

GOLD has input from many different sources:

"Will Lewis created the first version of the ontology by transforming
and organizing information obtained from SIL International's on-line
glossary of linguistic terms. A team of research assistants at the
University of Arizona then searched the linguistics literature and
doubled the size of the term set. Much of GOLD's intellectual content
can be attributed to Terry Langendoen who also coined the acronym.
Major development has been done by Gary Simons, Anthony Aristar, Brian
Fitzsimons, and many others involved with the E-MELD project. Most
recently in 2005, E-MELD sponsored a workshop to allow critique of the
content and structure of GOLD. The implementers are now revising GOLD
based on the suggestions from the E-MELD 2005 workshop participants.
In this they are being aided by consultation with The Surrey
Morphology Group, which is participating in a series of exchange
visits designed to improve the content coverage of GOLD."

http://linguistics-ontology.org/info/about

And in fact it wasn't even just SIL's glossary from the start, if you
include the rest of
the sentence you are quoting:

"In the beginning GOLD was constructed from the top-down using SIL
International's on-line glossary of linguistic terms and standard
linguistics sources, for example: David Crystal's Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language."

Whatever concerns you might have about SIL (and I understand there
are some legitimate ones), it seems odd to me to tar any other resources
that happen to have taken SIL resources into consideration in their development
with the same brush.  If you're going to ding some other resource because
of an SIL connection, to be credible you need to say *why* the concerns about
SIL lead to concerns about the quality of the resource.

Disclaimer: I wasn't at the workshop, so I don't know who was mentioning
concerns there, nor their relationship to the posters in this thread.

Emily

On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Christian Chiarcos
<christian.chiarcos at web.de> wrote:
> All that's true. But "[i]n the beginning GOLD was constructed from the
> top-down using SIL International's on-line glossary of linguistic terms and
> standard linguistics sources ..."
> (http://linguistics-ontology.org/info/about)
>
> Best,
> Christian
>
>
> On Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:35:56 +0200, Emily M. Bender <ebender at uw.edu> wrote:
>
>> In what sense is GOLD derived from work by SIL?  It grew out
>> of Scott Farrar's PhD work at the University of Arizona, and is
>> now maintained by LINGUIST List.
>>
>> Emily
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:17 AM, Christian Chiarcos
>> <christian.chiarcos at web.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> Actually, GOLD is originally derived from SIL. From a linguistic point of
>>> view, they're usually doing a truly great job, but some people object
>>> their
>>> religious-political agenda, hence an occasional reluctance to use their
>>> resources. And of course, SIL by itself is neither a standardization body
>>> nor an open community, so people prefer to work with SIL-derived work
>>> that
>>> is maintained by a community (e.g., GOLD) or independent institutions
>>> (e.g.,
>>> ISO).
>>>
>>> Another machine-readable terminology repository is ISOcat
>>> (http://isocat.org), of course, but it lacks the overall coherence of
>>> GOLD
>>> due to its bottom-up design. Also of interest may be the TDS ontology
>>> (http://languagelink.let.uu.nl/tds/index.html). All of these are,
>>> however,
>>> intended to be machine-readable rather than human-readable what seems to
>>> be
>>> what you're asking for.
>>>
>>> A human-readable repository of high quality is Grammis
>>> (http://hypermedia.ids-mannheim.de/call/public/termwb.html, German only).
>>> This one summarizes and defines the theoretical concepts employed in the
>>> publications of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim, Germany) in
>>> the
>>> last 30 years or so. They have a certain band-width of theoretical
>>> positions, but parts of their terminology are really IDS-specific.
>>>
>>> When I started to develop the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation almost
>>> a
>>> decade ago, I did a survey on terminology portals for linguistic
>>> terminology, and I was somewhat surprised to find to many of them. (And
>>> in
>>> the end, I took GOLD+ISOcat as my point of departure.) The survey is long
>>> outdated, of course, but I would guess that it should not be too
>>> complicated
>>> to find one with reasonable reliability and a theoretical orientation
>>> that
>>> suits your needs best. And of course, you are invited to share any
>>> results
>>> of such a survey ;)
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>> Christian
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:20:17 +0200, Hugh Paterson III
>>> <hugh at thejourneyler.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Well there is the GOLD ontology...  not quite a glossary, but any online
>>>> linguistics glossary should have a relationship with the GOLD ontology.
>>>>
>>>> But I too would be interested to know what the concerns are with the SIL
>>>> glossary. (If you mean the one which was part of the online version of
>>>> LinguaLinks). (as there is also the SIL french-englsih and the SIL
>>>> spanish-english linguistic glossaries.)
>>>>
>>>> - Hugh
>>>>
>>>> On Jun 7, 2013, at 1:29 PM, Blume, Maria wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi: This is a general question from someone new to this area, mainly
>>>>> directed to the people who attended the LDL Workshop in Frankfurt,
>>>>> since I
>>>>> know it was mentioned there.
>>>>>
>>>>> What are reliable online glossaries for linguistic terms? I know the
>>>>> SIL
>>>>> one but I think someone mentioned some concerns about it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
>>>>> María
>>>>> María Blume
>>>>> Assistant Professor
>>>>> Department of Languages and Linguistics
>>>>> Liberal Arts Building, Room 232
>>>>> University of Texas at El Paso
>>>>> El Paso, TX 79968
>>>>> mblume at utep.edu
>>>>> 915-747-6320
>>>>>
>>>>> Director of the UTEP Language Acquisition and Linguistics Research Lab
>>>>> Liberal Arts Building, Room 220
>>>>> University of Texas at El Paso
>>>>> El Paso, TX 79968
>>>>> 915-747-7024
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-linguistics
>>>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-linguistics
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Christian Chiarcos
>>> Applied Computational Linguistics
>>> Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
>>> 60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
>>>
>>> office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
>>> mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
>>> web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
>>> tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
>>> fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Christian Chiarcos
> Applied Computational Linguistics
> Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
> 60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
>
> office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
> mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
> web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
> tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
> fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931

-- 
Emily M. Bender
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
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