@inproceedings{borin-etal-2014-linguistic,
    title = "Linguistic landscaping of {S}outh {A}sia using digital language resources: Genetic vs. areal linguistics",
    author = "Borin, Lars  and
      Saxena, Anju  and
      Rama, Taraka  and
      Comrie, Bernard",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Loftsson, Hrafn  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}'14)",
    month = may,
    year = "2014",
    address = "Reykjavik, Iceland",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/L14-1175/",
    pages = "3137--3144",
    abstract = "Like many other research fields, linguistics is entering the age of big data. We are now at a point where it is possible to see how new research questions can be formulated - and old research questions addressed from a new angle or established results verified - on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than small, carefully selected samples. For example, South Asia is often mentioned in the literature as a classic example of a linguistic area, but there is no systematic, empirical study substantiating this claim. Examination of genealogical and areal relationships among South Asian languages requires a large-scale quantitative and qualitative comparative study, encompassing more than one language family. Further, such a study cannot be conducted manually, but needs to draw on extensive digitized language resources and state-of-the-art computational tools. We present some preliminary results of our large-scale investigation of the genealogical and areal relationships among the languages of this region, based on the linguistic descriptions available in the 19 tomes of Grierson{'}s monumental ``Linguistic Survey of India'' (1903-1927), which is currently being digitized with the aim of turning the linguistic information in the LSI into a digital language resource suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations."
}