CLLD – Cross-Linguistic Linked Data

Concepticon 1.0 released

posted Thursday, May 12, 2016 by Robert Forkel

We are happy to announce the release of Concepticon 1.0, a resource for the linking of concept lists. Our resource presents an attempt to link the large amount of different concept lists which are used in the linguistic literature, ranging from Swadesh lists in historical linguistics to naming tests in clinical studies and psycholinguistics.

Our Concepticon links concept labels from different conceptlists to concept sets. Each concept set is given a unique identifier, a unique label, and a human-readable definition. Concept sets are further structured by defining different relations between the concepts.

The resource can be used for various purposes. Serving as a rich reference for new and existing databases in diachronic and synchronic linguistics, it allows researchers a quick access to studies on semantic change, cross-linguistic polysemies, and semantic associations.

You can search through more than 30,000 different concept labels from 161 concept lists, which are now almost completely mapped to 2,632 concept sets. We added metadata, which will be useful when checking concept stability, including links to Babelnet, Wordnet, and some psycholinguistic norm databases, and although we know that this is all preliminary and needs further refinement in the future, we think it is a promising start towards more transparent data in historical linguistics.

We also regard Concepticon as a major building block in our attempt to specify useful but simple data formats for cross-linguistic research under the CLDF label. Word lists are about the simplest data structure in cross-linguistic research, yet, comparability was hampered by a lack of shared language and concept catalogs. Addressing the first with Glottolog and the second with our new Concepticon turns wordlists into simple lists of triples (form, conceptset-ID, glottocode). This interoperability increases the amount of data available to advanced tasks like automated cognate detection vastly, thus opening up new venues for research.

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