Language Documentation meets Language Technology

Abstract

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which use similar data and techni- cal frameworks and are carried out collaboratively in Uppsala, Tromsø, Syktyvkar and Freiburg. Our projects record and annotate spoken language data in order to provide comprehensive speech corpora as databases for future research on and for these endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more system- atically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Ultimately, the multimodal corpora created by our projects will be useful for scientifically signif- icant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.