Novel Incentives in Language Resource Development

The gap between supply of and demand for Language Resources continues to impede progress in linguistic research and technology development, even in the face of immense international effort to create the requisite data and tools. This deficiency affects all languages in some way, even those with worldwide economic and political influence. Moreover, for most of the world’s 7000 linguistic varieties the absence is acute. Current approaches cannot hope to meet the resource demand for even a reasonable subset of the languages currently spoken because they seek to document phenomena of great variability principally using resources, such as national funding, that are highly constrained in terms of amount, duration and scope. This paper describes efforts to augment the traditional incentives of monetary compensation with alternate incentives in order to elicit greater contributions of linguistic data, metadata and annotation. It also touches on the adjustments to workforces, workflows and post-processing needed to collect and exploit data elicited under novel incentives.