Databases in Historical Linguistics

Abstract.  A working group on historical linguistics last year came up with a position paper about the needs and methodologies for studying language evolution in the age of big data.  A general conclusion was that even though a lot of progress can be made with databases already available, “it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of carefully curated data sets that are accurate, reliable, uniformly transcribed, and correctly glossed.” Creation of such databases needs specialized linguistic knowledge, but their major consumers are the computational linguistics community. This proposed working group, therefore, plans to bring together these two communities to discuss the needs and possible developments in this area. The primary objects of the working group will be as follows: (a) present, discuss, and evaluate the existing online and offline linguistic database systems that have a comparative-historical aspect; (b) discuss the currently employed data formats in those databases and decide on possible improvements; (c) discuss and work out propositions on different programmed tools that would be useful for data analysis and allow to make valuable historical inferences.