# Towards a General-Purpose Linguistic Annotation Backend

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CMULAB: An Open-Source Framework for Training and Deployment of Natural Language Processing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02408/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language documentation is inherently a time-intensive process; transcription, glossing, and corpus management consume a significant portion of documentary linguists' work. Advances in natural language processing can help to accelerate this work, using the linguists' past decisions as training material, but questions remain about how to prioritize human involvement. In this extended abstract, we describe the beginnings of a new project that will attempt to ease this language documentation process through the use of natural language processing (NLP) technology. It is based on (1) methods to adapt NLP tools to new languages, based on recent advances in massively multilingual neural networks, and (2) backend APIs and interfaces that allow linguists to upload their data. We then describe our current progress on two fronts: automatic phoneme transcription, and glossing. Finally, we briefly describe our future directions.