Initiative for A Repository of SFL Resources
Background & Goals     Organization     Structure     Standards     Participation        

 

"A corpus is not simply a repository of
  useful examples. It is a treasury of
  acts of meaning that can be explored
  and interrogated from all illuminating
  angles, including in quantitative terms." *

                                              M.A.K. Halliday
 

Background and Goals

The Initiative for a Repository of SFL Resources (IRSFL) is motivated by the necessity to share resources in more comprehensive and effective ways. The goal of IRSFL is to provide an e-science infrastructure for the member of the SFL community by creating a worldwide repository of SFL resources, such as SFL descriptions of a wide variety of languages and other semiotic system, SFL analyses of texts in terms of phonology, grammar, semantics, discourse and context, SFL-based register profiles etc as well as tools that support SFL-based research.


Organization

IRSFL is a community initiative. This means that the success of the initiative entirely depends on the level of engagement of the members of the SFL community. The initiative will be organized in such a way that everybody is a provider and a consumer at the same time, being able to upload resources and tools and to download them or use them from a server and its mirror sites.

The organizers of the IRSFL are the Halliday Centre, City University of Hong Kong, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. The organizers will see to the implementation of the necessary e-science services. A server hosting the Repository of SFL resources will be set up in Hong Kong, with mirrors in Sydney and Darmstadt.


Structure of Repository of SFL Resources

There are three major components to the planned Repository of SFL Resources:

  1. SFL text archive

    Goal   Create a digital archive of texts.
     
    Tasks   1. Determine composition of the archive (registers, languages,
        modalities etc)
    2. Organize the process of populating the archive (upload, download)
    3. Implement procedures for normalizing texts (standard character
        encoding, meta data)
    4. Develop policy concerning copyrights, intellectual property rights,
        ethical issues
    5. Determine conditions of archive use
     
    Convenor   Christian Matthiessen, Macquarie University

       
  2. SFL text annotation/corpora
    Goal   Create a collection of SFL-annotated corpora.
     
    Tasks   1. Provide analysis support (e.g. develop and make available annotation
        guidelines for different varieties of SFL)
    2. Establish stable reference points (descriptions, sample analysis)
    3. Collect annotated corpora
    4. Give recommendations for resource creation
    5. Conduct shared task on annotation of texts from archive
    6. Determine conditions of use of corpora
     
    Convenor   Maria Herke, Macquarie University
       
  3. SFL tool infrastructure
    Goal   Provide tools supporting SFL analysis.
     
    Tasks   1. Build a web-based proof-of-concept system for text/corpus
        discovery, corpus search and corpus analysis
    2.     Recommend standard for corpus representation (based on XML)
    3. Provide information about standard annotation and corpus
        exploration tools (e.g., part-of-speech tagging, concordancing)
    4. Create tutorials for particular analysis tasks
                - Lexical Processing
            - Grammatical Processing
            - Text Processing
     
    Convenor   Elke Teich, Technische Universität Darmstadt


Commitment to Standards

The initiative is committed to working towards meeting the current standards in language resource representation and current best practices for the digital archiving of language resources (cf. e.g., Dublin Core, Ethnologue, OLAC, TEI, NIST, etc.).


Call for Participation

A repository of SFL resources will strengthen the SFL community at large by providing an environment for collaboration and sharing knowledge as well as considerably lowering start-up barriers.

The success of the initiative to build up such a repository entirely depends on the level of engagement of the members of the SFL community. If you share our vision, then we need you to give to this exciting initiative as generously as you are able. Of course, a shared resource such as this will require all of us to contribute texts and analysis. But, in order to realise this vision, we also need your time, expertise, whatever you can offer, to help us mobilise and move forward. Whether you have a little time or a lot, regardless of your level of linguistic or computational expertise, we are depending on your active support and collaboration.

We are establishing three task forces (TF 1-3) that kick-off the repository by seeing to the creation and implementation of the three components mentioned above.

We would like to invite you to express your interest in the Repository of SFL Resources by filling in this simple questionnaire. The information collected will solely be used for the contact regarding the initiative.

(^ required fields)
 
Name ^   (last name)
(first name)
Institution ^  
   
Country ^  
     
E-mail Address ^  
   
Website Address  
   
Which linguistic research area(s) do you specialize in? ^
 		 
(e.g., grammar, discourse, register, corpus linguistics)
 

Which language(s) do you work on? ^
  

  
 
Do you have any comments or suggestions to the repository?  
(within 500 characters)
 
   

* Halliday, M.A.K. (1996: 24). On Grammar and Grammatics. In R. Hasan, C. Cloran, D. Butt (Eds.), Functional Descriptions Theory in Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.