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dictionaries (cfr. Bortolotti & Rasom) meant to improve the language skills of native
speakers.
Several authors file contributions on tools for the elaboration and storage of language
for text analysis and processing of text material with a view to the development of
corpora. Puddu points out the importance of corpora for supporting the development
of lesser used languages and the main problems connected to corpus design, text
collection, storage and annotation for a lesser used language like Sardo (cf. Puddu).
Sardinian, like any other lesser used language, has to cope with problems related to
retrieval of written text, and in this specific case, also with a second problem: the
absence of a standard orthography. The application of a homogeneous tag system, as
well as the use of standards on storage, such as the rules elaborated by the EAGLES
group (XCES), is suggested.
Prinsloo and Heid describe methodology such as the bootstrapping of resources
in order to elaborate language documentation and annotation. They describe the
development of different tools to bootstrap tagging resources for Northern Sotho, and
resources used to identify verbs and nouns for the disambiguation of closed class items.
The Bantu languages and their characteristics are also discussed in the contribution by
Taljard and Bosh, who present the problems encountered when dealing with languages
with different writing systems — in this special case, Northern Sotho and Zulu. The
authors describe the distinct approaches for class tagging according to the different
writing systems.
Examples of knowledge extraction and knowledge engineering are discussed in
the paper on the FAME project, an Interlingual Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation
System for Catalan, English and Spanish developed to assist users in making hotel
reservations. The project includes tools for the documentation of data and elaboration
of the standard Interchange Format (IF).
It is clear from these contributions that nowadays, a variety of approaches and
scientific methodologies are adopted in research on lesser used languages, showing
the vitality of research in this specific area.
Thanks to authors who cover a large variety of projects and technologies, an
overview of the state of the art in research on lesser used languages can be provided,
especially as regards projects on lesser used languages involving computational
linguistics in Europe and the world. Central to the conference are both methodological
issues, prompted by the described strategies for an efficient support of lesser used
languages, and the problems encountered with theoretical approaches developed for
major languages but applied to lesser used languages.
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