Open Access

So far, comprehensive grammar descriptions of Northern Sotho have only been available in the form of prescriptive books aiming at teaching the language. This paper describes parts of the first morpho-syntactic description of Northern Sotho from a computational perspective (Faaß, 2010a). Such a description is necessary for implementing rule based, operational grammars. It is also essential for the annotation of training data to be utilised by statistical parsers. The work that we partially present here may hence provide a resource for computational processing of the language in order to proceed with producing linguistic representations beyond tagging, may it be chunking or parsing. The paper begins with describing significant Northern Sotho verbal morpho-syntactics (section 2). It is shown that the topology of the verb can be depicted as a slot system which may form the basis for computational processing (section 3). Note that the implementation of the described rules (section 4) and also coverage tests are ongoing processes upon that we will report in more detail at a later stage.

So far, there have been few descriptions on creating structures capable of storing lexicographic data, ISO 24613:2008 being one of the latest. Another one is by Spohr (2012), who designs a multifunctional lexical resource which is able to store data of different types of dictionaries in a user-oriented way. Technically, his design is based on the principle of a hierarchical XML/OWL (eXtensible Markup Language/Web Ontology Language) representation model. This article follows another route in describing a model based on entities and relations between them; MySQL (usually referred to as: Structured Query Language) describes a database system of tables containing data and definitions of relations between them. The model was developed in the context of the project "Scientific eLexicography for Africa" and the lexicographic database to be built thereof will be implemented with MySQL. The principles of the ISO model and of Spohr's model are adhered to with one major difference in the implementation strategy: we do not place the lemma in the centre of attention, but the sense description — all other elements, including the lemma, depend on the sense description. This article also describes the contained lexicographic data sets and how they have been collected from different sources. As our aim is to compile several prototypical internet dictionaries (a monolingual Northern Sotho dictionary, a bilingual learners' Xhosa–English dictionary and a bilingual Zulu–English dictionary), we describe the necessary microstructural elements for each of them and which principles we adhere to when designing different ways of accessing them. We plan to make the model and the (empty) database with all graphical user interfaces that have been developed, freely available by mid-2015.

In this article, we examine the current situation of data dissemination and provision for CMC corpora. By that we aim to give a guiding grid for future projects that will improve the transparency and replicability of research results as well as the reusability of the created resources. Based on the FAIR guiding principles for research data management, we evaluate the 20 European CMC corpora listed in the CLARIN CMC Resource family, individuate successful strategies among the existing corpora and establish best practices for future projects. We give an overview of existing approaches to data referencing, dissemination and provision in European CMC corpora, and discuss the methods, formats and strategies used. Furthermore, we discuss the need for community standards and offer recommendations for best practices when creating a new CMC corpus.

The paper presents the results of empirical research conducted with students from the Faculty of Translation studies of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences (VUAS) in Latvia. The study investigates the habits and practices concerning the use of dictionaries on the part of translation students, as well as types of dictionaries used, frequency of use, etc. The study also presents an insight into the evaluation of the usefulness of dictionaries by Latvian students. The research describes the advantages and disadvantages of dictionaries used by the respondents, the importance of the preface and the explanation of the terms and abbreviations used in dictionaries. The research conducted, as well as the insights, results and recommendations presented, will be relevant for the lexicographic community, as it reflects the experience of one Latvian University to improve the teaching of dictionary use and lexicographic culture in this country and to complement dictionary use research with the Latvian experience.

Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.