Author Archives: David Snee

About David Snee

I am a PhD student in the ERC project "ProduSemy" in the chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics at the University of Passau, Germany. I hold a BA in French and German from University College Dublin, Ireland, and an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Erfurt, Germany. My doctoral research focuses on utilizing computer-assisted methods to answer questions related to robustness in cross-linguistic datasets.

Computing Detailed Colexifications with Missing Data Information from the CLICS⁴ Collection

CLICS⁴ offers a refined structural representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns but retains an implicit representation of missing data. This obscures whether the lack of a colexification in a language for paired concepts is due to its true absence in the language, or due to missing data on the concept or word form level. We introduce a straightforward workflow that can be applied to individual datasets from CLICS⁴ to identify cases of colexification via a three-way attestation scheme. Our approach captures the presence or absence of a colexification in CLICS⁴, but it also explicitly encodes the presence or absence of data at the level of the original questionnaire, or the individual language, elicited with the help of the questionnaire.

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Using CLDFBench and PyLexibank on Windows

Using tools such as CLDFBench and PyLexibank, datasets can be converted into Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF), offering a standardized and interoperable representation of linguistic data. While these tools are powerful, lifting datasets to CLDF can present unique challenges for Windows users due to idiosyncrasies in the Windows operating system. Although CLDFBench and PyLexibank are compatible with Windows, certain workarounds may be necessary to address system-specific issues. This guide aims to demonstrate how CLDFBench and PyLexibank can be effectively installed and used on a Windows computer to lift a dataset to CLDF.

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