The Language Library: supporting community effort for collective resource production

Relations among phenomena at different linguistic levels are at the essence of language properties but today we focus mostly on one specific linguistic layer at a time, without (having the possibility of) paying attention to the relations among the different layers. At the same time our efforts are too much scattered without much possibility of exploiting other people’s achievements. To address the complexities hidden in multilayer interrelations even small amounts of processed data can be useful, improving the performance of complex systems. Exploiting the current trend towards sharing we want to initiate a collective movement that works towards creating synergies and harmonisation among different annotation efforts that are now dispersed. In this paper we present the general architecture of the Language Library, an initiative which is conceived as a facility for gathering and making available through simple functionalities the linguistic knowledge the field is able to produce, putting in place new ways of collaboration within the LRT community. In order to reach this goal, a first population round of the Language Library has started around a core of parallel/comparable texts that have been annotated by several contributors submitting a paper for LREC2012. The Language Library has also an ancillary aim related to language documentation and archiving and it is conceived as a theory-neutral space which allows for several language processing philosophies to coexist.