The Language Resource Archive of the 21st Century

Martin Wynne (Oxford University)

WO11: Specialised Written Corpora

What will an archive of language resources look like in the future? It is to be expected that developments in computer technology will have an impact on the nature of language resources which will be created in the future. A projection current trends into the future helps us to see that there will be more multimedia and multilingual resources. It is also likely that increasing internet bandwidth will lead to a more distributed architecture whereby resources are accessed remotely rather than held locally. This will also facilitate the development of virtual corpora, whereby temporary, ad hoc, collections of texts can be assembled for a specific analysis. Increasingly it will become the norm to extract information from resources held in the archive, rather than downloading the corpus, installing software to analyse it with and getting them to work together. It can therefore be predicted that although archives will continue to have an important role in the preservation of resources, other roles will develop or grow in importance, as archives adapt to allow the creation of virtual corpora and online access to resources, and become centres of resource creation expertise, metadata validation and resource discovery. This paper discusses the new directions envisaged by the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), and in particular its current initiatives to improve the service provided for the community of academic linguistics researchers in the UK.

Archive language resources corpus OTA

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