Proceedings

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2009 workshop Nordic Perspectives on the CLARIN Infrastructure of Language Resources. Editors: Rickard Domeij, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Steven Krauwer, Bente Maegaard, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Koenraad de Smedt. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 5 (2009), v+45 pp. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9207

Report on the Finnish Language

Language-centric AI is already ubiquitous and language technology is in its intrinsic core. As was stated in the report The Finnish Language in the Digital Age (Koskenniemi et al., 2012): “If there is adequate language technology available, it will be able to ensure the survival of languages with small populations of speakers.” During the last ten years, digitalisation has changed the way we communicate and interact in the world creating an increasing demand for language-based AI services. New skills are needed to be able to cope in the digital world, so digital education and media awareness are now taught in elementary schools. Digital skills are considered new citizen skills. To provide language-based services to an increasing number of users, we need applications that are built on AI, as well as to provide routine services to special groups and to meet accessibility requirements. The still small number of existing applications and services is partly due to the lack of language resources. Also, the small size of the Finnish market area has affected this when large corporations have primarily focused on English with only some support for Finnish in high-demand products in the Finnish market. In the field of language technology, the Finnish language is still only moderately equipped with products, technologies and resources. There are applications and tools for speech synthesis, speech recognition, information retrieval, spelling correction and grammar checking. There are also a few applications for automatically translating language. The situation has improved during the last 10 years, but still support for automated translation leaves room for ample improvement and the general support for spoken language is modest in industry applications although some recent research results are encouraging

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

Diachronic Perspective in Text and Discourse Studies: Review of Approaches

The article is devoted to scientific observation of historically- and socially-oriented discourse studies (historical discoursology) that are presented by means of various approaches and research traditions. The authors give a review of several well-established subfields in diachronic discourse studies of language units and text types, namely historical pragmatics, historical text linguistics, diachronic discourse analysis, with the focus on the tools and methodology employed to investigate historical changes in language-in-use practice. It is stated that in Russian linguistics the diachronic aspect of language units functioning has been studied so far within the framework of diachronic stylistics with the purpose to define via the analysis of language unit realizations semantic and functional potentials of language units and text constituents, to distinguish text composition with its dependency on social and cultural circumstances of text production, to discover synchronic / diachronic perspectives in general and specific discourse categories evolution. The authors make a suggestion that the use of corpus methods in the diachronic discourse studies might considerably enhance the perspectives of finding out some prototypical features of discourse and their historical variations, if a research is based on text collections (text data) that are being analyzed with the corpus analysis protocols, strictly set historical periods and general reference to a certain textual cultures. The clearly defined corpus data could certainly help in retrieving information on cognitive, social, cultural, pragmatic aspects of the discourse type represented in the text collection of a historical period under study. The further comparison of the data in particular historical periods and / or regional references opens the ways for discovering diachronic vectors in the discourse type development through stating changes, transformations, replacements in the discursive forms and genres