Language Engineering for Lesser-studied Languages

Technologies enabling computers to process specific languages facilitate economic and political progress of societies where these languages are spoken. Development of methods and systems for language processing is therefore a worthy goal for national governments as well as for business entities and scientific and educational institutions in every country in the world. As work on systems and resources for the 'lower-density' languages becomes more widespread, an important question is how to leverage the results and experience accumulated by the field of computational linguistics for the major languages in the development of resources and systems for lower-density languages. This issue has been at the core of the NATO Advanced Studies Institute on language technologies for middle- and low-density languages held in Georgia in October 2007. This publication is a collection - of publication-oriented versions - of the lectures presented there and is a useful source of knowledge about many core facets of modern computational-linguistic work. By the same token, it can serve as a reference source for people interested in learning about strategies that are best suited for developing computational-linguistic capabilities for lesser-studied languages either 'from scratch' or using components developed for other languages. The book should also be quite useful in teaching practical system- and resource-building topics in computational linguistics.