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data. The data is unlikely to be re-worked, or ported to new platforms or formats,
and thus it risks becoming obsolete or unreadable.
• BLPs Rely on Specialists: The bigger the group in a BLP, the more
specialists in programming languages, databases, linguistic theories, parsing, and
so forth it will integrate. Specialists make the BLP autonomous, since specific
solutions can be fabricated when needed.
• All-rounders at Work: Specialisation is less likely to be found in SLPs,
where one person has to cover a wider range of activities, theories, tools, and
so forth. in addition to administrative tasks. Thus, SLP projects cannot operate
autonomously. They largely depend on toolkits, integrated software packages, and
so forth. Choosing the right toolkit is not an easy task. It not only decides the
success or failure of the project, but will also influence the course of the research
more than the genius of the researcher. If a standard program is simply chosen
because the research group is acquainted with it, a rapid project start might be
bought at the price of a troublesome project history, data that is difficult to port
or upgrade, or data that does not match the linguistic reality it should describe.
• BLPs Play with Research Paradigms: BLPs can freely choose their
research paradigm and therefore frequently follow the most recent trends in
research. Although different research paradigms offer different solutions and have
different constraints, BLPs are not so sensitive to these constraints and can cope
successfully with any of them. BLPs must not only be capable of handling new
research paradigms; otherwise, the new research paradigms could not survive,
BLPs are even expected to explore new research paradigms, as they are the only
ones having the gross scientific product that can cope with fruitless attempts and
time-consuming explorations. Indeed, we observe that BLPs frequently turn to the
latest research paradigm to gain visibility and reputation. Shifts in the research
paradigm might make it necessary to recreate language resources in another
format or another logical structure.
• SLPs Depend on the Right Research Paradigm: SLPs do not dispose of
rich and manifold resources (dictionaries, tagged corpora, grammars, tag-sets, and
taggers) in the same way as BLPs do. The research paradigm should thus be chosen
according to the nature and quality of the available resources, and not according
to the latest fashion in research. This might imply the usage of a) example-
based methods, since they require less annotated data (cf. Streiter & de Luca
[2003]), b) unsupervised learning algorithms, if no annotations are available, or c)
hybrid bootstrapping methods (e.g. D. Prinsloo & U. Heid 2006), which are almost
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