LINGUIST List 5.835

Thu 21 Jul 1994

Qs: Urdu, Atlas of the World's Languages, 4 and 6, TDB software

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Q:Urdu materials
2. "J. Christina Smith", Atlas of the World's Languages
3. , Query: 4 and 6
4. Yim S. S., TDB software & data model

I have a student who needs to begin to teach himself Urdu, and wondered if
there were any appropriate materials out there for such a purpose. He was
particularly hoping for something with tapes that might help with the
pronunciation. Does anyone know of such materials?
Dilworth Parkinson

I am not a subscriber to this list, but I would like to ask for your
assistance. I have been trying to reach the Society for the Study of the
Indigenous Languages of the Americas, SSILA, to obtain a list of the
errors in the Atlas of the World's Languages, but my email and phone
attempts have not been successful. I would like to know if anyone has
this list and could email or fax or snail mail it to me. I would
appreciate any information on the relationship between SSILA and
Routledge regarding this book, as well.
J. Christina Smith
jchrisacs.bu.edu
Anthropology/Sociology Bibliographer
Mugar Memorial Library
Boston University
771 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
617/353-3715
617/353-2084 fax

Thanks.

Does anybody know of examples where, diachronically, the
words for '4' and '6' are connected?

Dear fellow-netters,

I would like to post a query about computer-aided terminology database
(TDB) production. So far, research on NLP has led to build some
softwares which facilitate different activities around TDB as term
extraction, concept analysis, TDB editing and query, etc. But to
organize the production of a big term bank while trying to take
advantage of new technologies, one has to address issues like
- smooth integration of tools and standards developed separately
 (e.g., TERMINO works rather good for french, about it does not care
 problems at input and output levels, creating thus extra burden -
 scan text with unreliable OCR, pre-process text - for people who
 wish to use it),
- balance between optimization of TDB and available resources (e.g.,
 requirement of accuracy about concepts' definition and relation
 opposed to non specialized staff and limited time),
- ease for updating data,
- reusability of data for different needs,
- and so on and so on.

Also, provided that a term bank differs from a word bank in that each
record of a TDB should, ideally, express ONE CONCEPT that may be
represented by a set of semantic relations or by a literal description
(or by a picture, but this possibility is not relevant to the question
here) to which extent a term bank can, by its data structure,
- allow reliable (semi-)automatic data processing for the purpose of
 validation, updating, comparison or extraction?
- offer different and efficient query paths to access a concept with
 accuracy (least redundancy and silence)?

It's for all that reason that I would appreciate any answers
(information, bibliographic sources, contacts or Internet sites,
opinions, advices, and so on) related to:

- Integrated softwares for TDB production, e.g.: I heard about a such
 software named LexPro, probably made in Europe. I would like very
 much to know more about it;

- TDB related research or projet reports, e.g.: representation of
 semantic relations (is_a, has_a, as well as OTHER KINDS OF
 RELATIONS) for TDB, data model and implementation for TDB,
 Implementation of SGML conformant TDB, etc.).

Please reply me directly and I will post a summary as soon as it is
worthwhile.

With my hearty thanks in advance!

Seong-Sook Yim
k17420er.uqam.ca