Category Archives: Code

Parsing IPA Transcriptions with CLTS

The Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (CLTS, https://clts.clld.org) project serves as a reference catalogue for speech sounds. At the core of the project is a generative method that parses existing IPA transcriptions (or transcriptions in other supported transcription systems) and checks if they conform to the principles and components laid out in the reference catalogue. As a result, Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems is much more than a simple list of possible speech sounds transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but a system that allows to generate possible speech sounds and to check if sounds provided in various transcription systems contain problems. This study gives a short overview on the basic ideas that lead to the creation of the database and the parsing method and provides some examples showing how it can be employed in practice.

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Sequence Manipulation with Orthography Profiles in JavaScript

Orthography profiles allow for the explicit simultaneous segmentation and conversion of sequences from one orthography to another. They play a crucial role in the standardization workflows developed as part of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative, where they are used to convert original orthographies used for language documentation to a strict version of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Given that the basic algorithm by which orthography profiles can be used to segment and convert sequences across orthographies is very straightforward, it can be easily implemented in JavaScript.
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Leveraging JavaScript, jQuery, and ChatGPT for Data Extraction from Web Tables

This case study explores the combined use of JavaScript, jQuery, and the AI-driven tool ChatGPT to efficiently extract data from HTML tables, specifically focusing on a website containing Middle Chinese and Old Chinese readings of characters. The study provides a step-by-step guide for accessing the website, utilizing browser developer tools, implementing JavaScript and jQuery code, and leveraging ChatGPT to refine the extraction process. By employing this methodology, the extraction of Chinese characters and their corresponding readings from an HTML table was automated, saving time and effort. The resulting data was then imported into a Google Sheets document for further analysis. This case study highlights the potential of AI-driven tools to enhance web development tasks and streamline data extraction processes, demonstrating their value for both technical and non-technical users.

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Creating Custom Commands in CLDF: From Lexibank to Nexus Files

Thanks to the CLDFBench Python package, CLDF datasets compiled with CLDFbench have a rich command-line utility that can easily be expanded by custom commands (Forkel et al. 2018, Forkel and List 2020) . Taking as an example the creation of a Nexus-file for phylogenetic analysis from an existing Lexibank Wordlist (List et al. 2022) , this tutorial will guide you through the necessary steps for writing a script that can be used as a CLDFBench command. You will then be able to apply the same workflow to other scripts you may want to use for a certain repository.

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PyEDICTOR: A Small Python Package that Integrates LingPy, EDICTOR, and CLDF

With the introduction of CLDF as a major format for data exchange, there is an increased need in handy solutions for the conversion of CLDF to the formats required by computer-assisted tools like LingPy and EDICTOR, which allow to preprocess data automatically or to curate data by adding detailed annotations. With the publication PyEDICTOR, there is now a very lightweight software package that is supposed to provide first solutions for a successful integration of CLDF with these existing tools for computer-assisted language comparison.

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How to Visualize Colexification Networks with JavaScript and D3 (How to do X in Linguistics 12)

Having seen how colexifications can be inferred and how colexification networks can be computed in previous posts, this post concludes our mini series in showing how computed colexification networks can be visualized interactively, using a JavaScript application based on the popular visualization library D3.

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How to Map Concepts with the PySem Library

Mapping concepts to common concept identifiers across resources has become an important task for the aggregation of lexical data from different sources. With the Concepticon, this task has been facilitated due to a specific mapping algorithm by which a concept list can be automatically mapped to the concept sets in the Concepticon reference catalogue in order to be later manually refined. PySem offers an additional possibility to map concepts to the Concepticon, but in contrast to the algorithm used in the Concepticon workflow, the PySem approach can be accessed from within Python applications.

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Mapping Multi-SimLex to Concepticon

Multi-SimLex (https://multisimlex.com) is a multilingual resource which provides user ratings for word pairs translated into different languages. The data is important for the evaluation of methods that derive word embeddings from large corpora. While it is on the one hand desirable to link such a large dataset to Concepticon, it is difficult to do so in concrete, given that the datasets represents word similarity ratings withouth any clear reference to concepts. In this post, I will show how the data can nevertheless be linked to Concepticon, and how the original Multi-SimLex data can be represented without losing any information in the form of a Concepticon Concept List.

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How to work with WALS data in CLDF (How to do X in linguistics 5)

With an increasing amount of data being available in Cross-Linguistic Formats, it is becoming more and more important to know the basics underlying the Python packages designed by the CLDF initiative in order to allow interested users a quick access to the data. This very short tutorial illustrates how the CLDF data underlying the World Atlas of Language structures can be accessed and written to a table in which each individual values for all WALS parameters are for each language variety in one row.

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How to handle semantic data with tables (How to do X in linguistics 3)

Semantic data are notoriously difficult to handle. In contrast to the form-part of the linguistic sign, meanings are not organized sequentially, but rather network-like (List 2014: 34f). As a result, we often encounter problems when trying to model complex relations between different meanings, specifically in those cases, where we have only tables as our base material. This blog post tries to summarize how major types of semantic data are handled in the Concepticon project and how they can be accessed in code.

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Computing colexification statistics for individual languages in CLICS

In the last two weeks we had a renewed interest in colexifications, especially in the third generation of the “Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications” (Rzymski, Tresoldi, et al., 2020). The attention was due to two different and independent requests in few days. For those unfamiliar, the concept of “colexification” (François, 2008) refers to instances in which a language uses the same lexeme to express more than one comparable concept (e.g., Russian де́рево, which can mean both “tree” and “wood”). The CLICS project, first developed by List et al. (2014), is an offspring of the transparent approaches to standardization, aggregation, and curation of linguistic data that have been promoted within the CLDF framework (Forkel et al., 2018). It uses standardized lexical databases to identify “colexification networks”.

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Concept Similarity in STARLING

STARLING is a software package, originally created by Sergej A. Starostin, which is designed for historical linguists who want to build their own etymological dictionaries. It is not only a database system that allows its users to set up a very straightforward relational database structure, but also a package full of surprises, since it contains many methods that are supposed to automate specific tasks in historical linguistics. These range from phylogenetic tree reconstruction via the preliminary identification of sound correspondences up to the comparison of elicitation glosses for their semantic similarity. While phylogenetic reconstruction and sound correspondences are now quite successfully handled in alternative software packages, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the routine for assessing concept similarity in more detail, since it offers interesting possibilities for those who practice historical language comparison.

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Illustrating linguistic data reuse: a modest database for semantic distance

Besides new algorithms and tools that facilitate established workflows, one change prompted by computer-assisted approaches to language comparison is a distinct relationship between scientists and their data. A critical part of our work, and perhaps the one with the most lasting impact, is to promote an approach in which the data life-cycle is not constrained within the limits of planning and publishing a study. Data are organized and planned for reuse in investigations perhaps not even considered during collection, with the output of one project becoming the input of another.

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