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Linguistics project receives megagrant

Anna Vladimirovna Dybko, a doctor of science in linguistics, chief researcher and head of the Department of Ural-Altaic languages of RAS Institute of Linguistics, RAS corresponding member, professor of Center of comparative studies of Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies of RSUH, became one of the winners of the fifth competition for megagrants.

This is the first linguistics project which received a megagrant. Its goal is to describe languages of southern Siberia in synchrony, diachrony and interaction, paying attention to a maximum possible number of important parameters.

Processing of huge linguistics data packages is assumed to be part of the work. Development of software shell as well as entry format of this data is required. At the moment, steps in that direction are being made with the help of the ISP RAS specialists. They developed a shell for linked hierarchic vocabulary databases, in which phonetic files with actual sounds (taken from expeditionary materials) as well as spectrograms made in Praat program can easily be added, which improves phonetic analysis capacity.

At present, the ISP RAS programmers are developing a convenient storage for sounded text corpuses with parsing – on the base of existing shell ELAN, but with capability of uploading and editing parsing results with the help of above-mentioned program. Also, syntactic and semantic marking packages are being developed, mostly for creating automatic filters in parsing.