briefingpaper: Digital Tools for Linguistics

In addition to sections introducing the discipline and computational approaches relating to it, this paper includes sections on corpus linguistics, knowledge-based systems and developer tools and environments.

The field of linguistics draws heavily on computational approaches and is a field where programming skills and high levels of technical expertise are common. Broadly speaking, early work in the field centred on the problems of natural language processing and the development of techniques to enable sophisticated human-machine interaction in a variety of ways. A significant amount of work was carried out to try and make progress in areas such as machine translation, speech recognition and automated question/answer systems (artificial intelligence) and a lot of this work was based on advances made in information theory by figures such as Claude Shannon who as early as 1948 wrote the influential paper, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’.

The long-established relationship between Computer Science and Linguistics is indicative of the centrality of digital tools development to the discipline and as a result, there is a prodigious amount of software available to researchers to carry out a wide variety of sometimes quite specific functions. Scholars engaging with linguistics have no choice but to embrace digital tools because their research is often predicated on the detailed and quantitative analysis of large amounts of digitized text. However, one of the unifying conclusions to many articles and essays concerning the subject is that quantitative research methods have to be mediated with qualitative analysis. As Marilyn Deegan states in her rapporteur’s report relating to the Methods Network expert seminar on linguistics, ‘there is no such thing as bias-free research or intuition-free linguistics’.

http://methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/pdf/wkp03.pdf

This paper is one of nine working papers written for the AHRC ICT Methods Network. The Methods Network Working Papers form part of the range of information and support materials that have been assembled to assist arts and humanities researchers with the task of acquiring knowledge about ICT tools and methods. The papers focus on various different disciplines but also highlight where tools and methods can be of benefit to multiple subject areas.

It is anticipated that these documents may serve a number of non-exclusive functions:

• To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentary;
• As reference documents that foreground links and references to other material;
• As an introductory resource for researchers who are new to digital developments in a particular subject area;
• As a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organisation and community-building activities.