Designing A Long Lasting Linguistic Project: The Case Study of ASIt

Designing A Long Lasting Linguistic Project: The Case Study of ASIt Maristella Agosti1, Emanuele Di Buccio1, Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio1, Cecilia Poletto2, Esther Rinke2 1: University of Padua, 2: Goethe Universit¨at Frankfurt Am Main {agosti,dibuccio,dinunzio}@dei.unipd.it, {poletto,rinke}@em.uni-frankfurt.de Abstract In this paper, we discuss the requirements that a long lasting linguistic database should have in order to meet the needs of the linguists together with the aim of durability and sharing of data. In particular, we discuss the generalizability of the Syntactic Atlas of Italy (ASIt), a linguistic project that builds on a long standing tradition of collecting and analyzing linguistic corpora, on a more recent project that focuses on the synchronic and diachronic analysis of the syntax of Italian and Portuguese relative clauses. The results that are presented are in line with the FLaReNet Strategic Agenda that highlighted the most pressing needs for research areas, such as Natural Language Processing, and presented a set of recommendations for the development and progress of Language Resources (LR) in Europe (Soria et al., 2014). Keywords: Linguistic Resources, Digital Libraries, Tagging Relative Clauses 1. Background Language Resources (LRs) are critical in the development of applications for overcoming language barriers, docu- menting endangered languages, and for supporting research of several fields. The FLaReNet Strategic Agenda high- lighted the most pressing needs for research areas, such as Natural Language Processing, and presented a set of rec- ommendations for the development and progress of LRs in Europe (Soria et al., 2014). In particular, the recommen- dations are organised according to broad thematic clusters that go from availability, sharing and distribution to cover- age, quality and adequacy. Language resources that have already been made publicly available vary in the richness of the information they contain (Bird et al., 2009). How- ever, the quality – one of the thematic clusters addressed by the Strategic Agenda – of such corpora may have been re- duced by the uncontrolled usage of automatic learning algo- rithms (Sp¨arck Jones, 2007). Interoperability, sharing and re-use of linguistic resources are issues that are often not carefully addressed in linguistic projects. In fact, the het- erogeneity of linguistic projects has been recognized as a key problem limiting the reusability of linguistic tools and data collections (Chiarcos, 2012). A significant example of a study that showed how heterogeneity negatively af- fects the re-use and integration of data is represented by the Edisyn search engine – the aim of which was to make different dialectal databases comparable – which “in prac- tice has proven to be unfeasible” even when the linguistic framework and the type of data gathered are very similar.1 For these reasons, the methodological and technological boundaries existing in each linguistic project need to be overcome in order to find common grounds where linguis- tic material can be shared and re-used over a long period of time. Consequently, a possibly standardized methodol- ogy for designing linguistic databases is necessary to de- velop linguistic resources that fully meet the desiderata of the Strategic Agenda. Curated databases (Peter Buneman …

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