The Human Language Project: Building a Universal Corpus of the World's Languages

We present a grand challenge to build a corpus that will include all of the world’s languages, in a consistent structure that permits large-scale cross-linguistic processing, enabling the study of universal linguistics. The focal data types, bilingual texts and lexicons, relate each language to one of a set of reference languages. We propose that the ability to train systems to translate into and out of a given language be the yardstick for determining when we have successfully captured a language. We call on the computational linguistics community to begin work on this Universal Corpus, pursuing the many strands of activity described here, as their contribution to the global effort to document the world’s linguistic heritage before more languages fall silent.