SIG:TEI for Linguists

Aims

This Special Interest Group is meant for those interested in linguistics, in the TEI, and in putting the two together.

Contact details, information

• Mailing list subscription page (acts as an unofficial list of members)
• LingSIG at GitHub
• LingSIG and related presentations, hosted at SourceForge
• Mr. Jenkins makes sure that our XML is good-mannered

Activities

The SIG activities include official meetings at TEI-MMs, conference reports and e-mail exchange on the mailing list. As part of its activity, the SIG attempted to track and record papers that deal with using various markup standards for the purpose of encoding linguistic analyses and language resources. That list is not maintained (but you're welcome to change that).

Tickets/Issues

The "LingSIG" label may be used in the GitHub ticketing system to informally indicate items that either have been posted as a result of LingSIG-related work or that could possibly benefit from extra attention on the group's part. Nothing more beyond that is implied; in particular, the label is not meant to exclude any other SIGs or individuals from the discussion.

• relevant GitHub issues
• Bugs in the LingSIG's scope of interest (at SourceForge, of historical value only)
• Feature Requests in the LingSIG's scope of interest (at SourceForge, of historical value only)

Meetings

• The first official meeting took place in Zadar, on 13 November 2010; see the agenda and the minutes. The meeting was preceded by the LLiZ (Linguistic Lunch in Zadar) and a poster presentation.
• The second meeting took place in Würzburg, on 14 October 2011. The meeting presented the LingSIG bibliography maintained as a Zotero library, for everyone to use and add to (please?). Its recurring theme was "keep the SIG aware about the stuff you're doing". (slides)
• The third meeting took place in College Station, TX. (slides)
• The fourth meeting took place on Oct 3 2013 in Rome. (slides). It was preceded by a workshop on the "Perspectives on querying TEI-annotated data", co-organised by the conveners of the SIG.
• Due to an interplay of mostly unforeseen factors, the fifth meeting in Chicago was the least fruitful of all. Let's make sure that it will remain an edge case.
• The sixth meeting took place in Lyon, on Thursday, October 29th. It featured four presentations and discussion.
• The seventh meeting took place in Vienna, during TEI-MM-2016, and featured a half-day workshop devoted to lexical and terminological representations.
• The 8th meeting was held in Victoria, BC.
• The 9th meeting was held during the Tokyo conference. Topic: the limits of the TEI and how to push them.
• The 10th meeting... conGraz!
• A hiatus followed (guess why) but the LingSIG came back in 2022, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (slides).
• At this point, virtual meetings begin, so that the SIG can keep in touch between MMs. The first virtual meeting was held in March 2023 (slides: when ready).

Bibliography

The SIG has put together an initial bibliography of works relevant to linguistics and markup (TEI in particular but not only -- the world is full of sources of inspiration). The bibliography is maintained as a Zotero resource. No one in particular is responsible for maintaining the resource, so everyone is... please feel welcome to help expand it.

Projects

TEI projects with a linguistic focus
(this is an open list, please feel welcome to edit or make suggestions for inclusion!)

• Trafilatura
• FreeDict
• TXM
• Open Content Text Corpus (it needs you)
• FSD Validator (you need it)
• GitHub repositories of the LingSIG

The most relevant chapters of the Guidelines

• 8. Transcriptions of Speech
• 9. Dictionaries: we need to have a plan so that the NLP community does consider this as a default vocabulary for representing NLP lexica (e.g. full form lexica)
• 15. Language Corpora
• 17. Simple Analytic Mechanisms
• 18. Feature Structures
• 20. Non-hierarchical Structures
• Terminology chapter, now gone; a half-spoken promise of its return lingers in the air

Related SIGs

• Ontologies
• Computer-Mediated Communication
• Tools (inactive)
• Overlap (inactive)

History

• Here's how it began
• TEI Guidelines have their apocrypha as well, here's one on corpus annotation. Note that it is absolutely non-normative, included here to give credit to the original Working Group and to provide a platform to either elaborate on or to diverge from.

The first official meeting of the SIG took place on 13 November 2010 at the TEI-MM in Zadar. This meeting was preceded by a reconnaissance lunch (we liked both the intel and the food) and a Poster Slam presentation (boyakasha...).