Mining and Migrating Interlinear Glossed Text

1.0 Introduction The World Wide Web is rapidly becoming the primary source for disseminating data on the world’s languages. Language researchers, linguists and language communities are regularly posting a variety of language data to the Web, including lexicons, teaching materials, language recordings and transcriptions, language descriptions, and grammars. Also posted in large quantities are scholarly papers on language, posted regularly by innovative online-only publications (e.g., Snippets), by traditional linguistic publications offering online editions, and by linguists themselves. Of significant potential utility to linguists is the language and linguistic data contained in these documents, specifically data presented in the form of Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT). Generally, IGT consists of a line of language data, often broken down by morpheme, a line of grammatical and gloss information aligned with the text in the first line, and a line representing the translation. An example is shown in (1). Variations to this basic form abound, but its most frequent instantiation is this basic three-line format.