Languages under the influence: Building a database of Uralic languages

The 3rd International Workshop for Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages, pages 10–24, St. Petersburg, Russia, 23–24 January 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Languages under the influence: Building a database of Uralic languages Eszter Simon, Nikolett Mus Research Institute for Linguistics Hungarian Academy of Sciences {simon.eszter, mus.nikolett}@nytud.mta.hu Abstract For most of the Uralic languages, there is a lack of systematically collected, consequently transcribed and morphologically annotated text corpora. This pa- per sums up the steps, the preliminary results and the future directions of build- ing a linguistic corpus of some Uralic languages, namely Tundra Nenets, Udmurt, Synya Khanty, and Surgut Khanty. The experiences of building a corpus con- taining both old and modern, and written and oral data samples are discussed. Principles concerning data collection strategies of languages with different level of vitality and endangerment are discussed. Methodologies and challenges of data processing, and the levels of linguistic annotation are also described in detail. 1 Introduction This paper sums up the steps, the preliminary results and the future directions of building a linguistic corpus of some Uralic languages within the research project called Languages under the Influence. The project started in February 2016 and lasts until July 2017 and is funded by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (grant ID: ERC_HU_15 118079). It is a pre-ERC project getting national support to enter the European Research Council (ERC) programme¹, thus it is a pilot project. Its aim is to create the theoretical This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence. Licence details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ ¹https://erc.europa.eu/ 1 10 and methodological basis of an ERC project proposal, which is called as ‘the main project’ in the article. The main project has a twofold objective. As for the theoretical investigations, it focuses on potential syntactic changes affected by the heavy influence of the Rus- sian language in several Uralic languages spoken in the Russian Federation (mainly in Siberia). Our research covers, among others, the change of basic word order (i.e. the SOV-to-SVO order), the spreading of finite subordination and clause-initial comple- mentizers, and the diversification of indefinite pronouns. The languages involved are Tundra Nenets, Udmurt, Synya Khanty, and Surgut Khanty. On the other hand, the main project’s computational objective is to build a linguis- tically annotated database of written and spoken sources in the aforementioned lan- guages, which makes it possible to research on Uralic–Russian language contacts. In order to observe syntactic changes of minority languages under the influence, we aim at processing texts collected from different times. It is known, however, that the lit- eracy of Uralic languages do not have a long history and tradition. The oldest sources included in our project originate from the beginning of the 20th century (when or- ganized expeditions were undertaken in order to document and describe Uralic lan- guages). In addition, we gather data from published and/or electronically accessible sources, which are presented by fieldworks undertaken recently. We focus on select- ing texts provided by as many authors as possible from …

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