Time to Change the "D" in "DEL"
Stephen Beale · 2014
The “D ” in “DEL ” stands for “documenting” – a code word for linguists that means the collection of linguistic data in audio and writ-ten form. The DEL (Documenting Endan-gered Languages) program run by the NSF and NEH is thus centered around building and archiving data resources for endangered languages. This paper is an argument for ex-tending the ‘D ’ to include “describing ” lan-guages in terms of lexical, semantic, morpho-logical and grammatical knowledge. We pre-sent an overview of descriptive computa-tional tools aimed at endangered languages along with a longer summary of two particu-lar computer programs: Linguist’s Assistant and Boas. These two programs, respectively, represent research in the areas of: A) compu-tational systems capable of representing lexi-cal, morphological and grammatical struc-tures and using the resulting computational models for translation in a minority language context, and B) tools for efficiently and accu-rately acquiring linguistic knowledge. A hoped-for side effect of this paper is to pro-mote cooperation between these areas of re-search in order to provide a total solution to describing endangered languages. 1