Visualization of Language Relations and Families: MultiTree

Damir Cavar, Malgorzata Cavar


Abstract
MultiTree is an NFS-funded project collecting scholarly hypotheses about language relationships, and visualizing them on a web site in the form of trees or graphs. Two open online interfaces allow scholars, students, and the general public an easy access to search for language information or comparisons of competing hypotheses. One objective of the project was to facilitate research in historical linguistics. MultiTree has evolved to a much more powerful tool, it is not just a simple repository of scholarly information. In this paper we present the MultiTree interfaces and the impact of the project beyond the field of historical linguistics, including, among others, the use of standardized ISO language codes, and creating an interconnected database of language and dialect names, codes, publications, and authors. Further, we offer the dissemination of linguistic findings world-wide to both scholars and the general public, thus boosting the collaboration and accelerating the scientific exchange. We discuss also the ways MultiTree will develop beyond the time of the duration of the funding.
Anthology ID:
L14-1019
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
698–701
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1022_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Damir Cavar and Malgorzata Cavar. 2014. Visualization of Language Relations and Families: MultiTree. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 698–701, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Visualization of Language Relations and Families: MultiTree (Cavar & Cavar, LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1022_Paper.pdf