Mining Language Resources from Institutional Repositories

Language resources are the bread and butter of language documentation and linguistic investigation. They include the primary objects of study such as texts and recordings, the outputs of research such as dictionaries and grammars, and the enabling technologies such as software tools and interchange standards. Increasingly, these resources are maintained in digital form and distributed via the web. However, searching on the web for language resources is a hit-and-miss affair. One problem is that many online resources are hidden behind interfaces to databases with the result that only a fraction of these resources are being indexed by search engines (He and others 2007). Even when resources are exposed to online search engines, they may not be discoverable since they are described in ad hoc ways that prevent searches from retrieving the desired results with high recall or precision.