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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When the macaw teaches you to eat the Brazil nut: A concept list for the study of Tupían languages

This is a joint post by Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi, Carolina Coelho Aragon, and Stanislav Reichert.

Whereas the choice of vocabulary needed for analyses in computational historical linguistics is often determined by criteria like stability and resistance to borrowing, one might also be interested in culturally relevant concepts because of their value for reconstructing the proto-culture and even population movements of individual language families. Having striven to find concepts to which these criteria apply within the Tupían language family, we came up with a list of 447 concepts. This post presents the complete list and then briefly illustrates some of the criteria employed in choosing them.

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A list of color, emotion, and human body part concepts

Color, emotion, and human body parts are often considered universal semantic domains. However, cross-linguistic comparison of the connections within each of the domains reveals interesting differences across languages (e.g., Jackson et al. 2019). Researchers in lexical typology systematically collect the names for colors, emotions, and human body parts across various languages and analyze the principles of how naming patterns evolve. Using the same word for multiple concepts or colexification, for example, Vietnamese xanh denoting the colors green and blue, is often discussed in those studies. To study the colexifications across the three semantic domains color, emotion, and human body part, we need a set of comparable concepts. This blog post introduces a list of 192 concepts across all three domains based on the available concept sets in Concepticon (List et al. 2016, 2021).

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How to write a term paper in linguistics (How to do X in linguistics 9)

Writing a term paper requires the same scrutiny as writing an article for a journal. As a result, the techniques which apply when writing term papers are very similar to those which apply when writing a journal article, and students should feel encouraged to take the task as seriously as a journal article that scientists send off to peer review. In the following, I will briefly introduce major techniques that help to structure one’s work when writing a term paper and which also help to interact well with one’s supervisor during the writing process.

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Converting the Vietic Dataset by Sidwell and Alwes from 2021 to CLDF

A few days ago, Sidwell and Alwes submitted a very nice dataset on Vietic languages to Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.5263194). When inspecting the data, I realized that this dataset could be easily converted to our CLDF formats in our new Lexibank standards. Since both authors explicitly invited for discussions of the data and the testing of the results, I thought it would even be better to quickly illustrate the CLDF conversion in a blog post, as this may enable colleagues to do the same with their datasets in the future.

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How to Share Data and Code when Submitting Papers to a Journal: Transparent Data (How to do X in Linguistics 8)

When sharing data and code when submitting papers to a journal, you need to make sure that the reviewers can test and inspect your data as conveniently as possible. In between reviews, you should also be maximally transparent on any changes that have been made to the data or the code underlying your study. When using data that was published elsewhere, this means you should pay specific attention to the versions you have used and make sure they are readily accessible.

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Computer-Assisted Comparison of Gelong and Hlai using Cross-Linguistic Data Formats

In this study, we discuss the sparsely studied Gelong language of Hainan Island and its affiliation to the Hlai languages. Our work is based on Andy Chin’s article “The Gelong Language in the Multilingual Hub of Hainan”. We extracted Chin’s data and processed it with the help of various computer-assisted methods in order to make it more accessible, machine-readable, and comparable with other datasets.

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A multilingual body part concept list

In the summer of 2018, I set out to collect data for my master’s thesis (Tjuka 2019). The goal was to elicit body part terms that can also refer to object and landscape features. This was BC (before COVID-19), so I was able to meet with informants living in Berlin at the time and conduct my urban fieldwork study. The informants who participated in the study spoke one of 13 different languages (e.g., Wolof, Vietnamese, Czech). As a first task, I elicited 28 body part terms to get a sense of the naming patterns in each language. This blog post provides background information and introduces the resulting multilingual body part concept list.

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How to Share Data and Code when Submitting Papers to a Journal: Practical Questions (How to do X in Linguistics 7)

The scientific culture in linguistics has been changing recently, and more and more papers are published with code and data accompanying them. What is still often forgotten, however, is that code and data should also be shared with the reviewers during the first submission of a paper in order to guarantee a maximally transparent review process that includes also a thorough inspection of the data and the code. This calls for attention from two sides: Reviewers should make sure that they receive data and code if they are needed to replicate the results reported in a paper, while authors should make sure to submit them to the reviewers in a way that they can easily inspect them. In this new blog post series, I want to summarize what authors should keep in mind when preparing their data and code for submission to a journal. On the one hand, I hope that this post will increase awareness among colleagues that data and code should be shared upon submission. On the other hand, I hope it also provides active help to all colleagues who plan to submit an article to a journal and are not sure how to share their data in the best form.

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Data Gathering in Times of a Pandemic: Upcycling Constenla Umaña’s Data on the Chibchan, Lencan and Misumalpam Language Families

While searching for the topic of a small research project about the linguistic history of South America, I realized that a lot of data that is crucial for assessing central arguments is not openly available, but new data is difficult to come by these days. And when it is, it is not usually presented in data format that allows for easy reuse. Guided by these thoughts, I decided to turn towards the upcycling of previously published data (also called retro-standardization, see for example Geisler et al. (forthcoming) on the upcycling of the TPPSR dataset, https://tppsr.clld.org). The dataset I chose was previously published by Adolfo Constenla Umaña (2005). In this article, the author investigated comparatively the long-claimed genealogical relationship of three families of Central and South America, Chibchan, Lencan and Misumalpam (Lehmann 1920).

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Using EDICTOR 2.0 to Annotate Language-Internal Cognates in a German Wordlist

With the recent publication of the new version of the EDICTOR application for the curation and creation of etymological dictionaries, several new features were introduced which target specifically the annoation of language-internal word families opposed to cross-linguistic cognates. While working on the EDICTOR update, I carried out intensive tests of the new features by annotating a German wordlist for language-internal cognates. In this post, I will quickly discuss some of the new features in EDICTOR 2.0 by showing some examples of the freshly annotated wordlist for German.

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How to review concept lists in collaboration (How to do X in linguistics 6)

In 2016, the Concepticon was introduced as a reference catalog for linguistic data of various kinds (List et al. 2016). The aim of the Concepticon project is to collect concept lists and link the glosses in the lists to unified concept sets (List et al. 2016; List et al. 2020). The project is a collaborative effort and the group of editors is constantly adding new data to the Concepticon (https://concepticon.clld.org/). In 2019, we implemented a review process that works similar to a submission process at an academic journal and is improving the quality of the resource in many ways. This blog post describes our effort to improve data validity by reviewing every single concept list that is added to the Concepticon. The database is curated openly on GitHub, so you can follow our review process by looking at several examples here: https://github.com/concepticon/concepticon-data

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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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