INTERNET RESOURCES

Abstract

Language, whether it be written, spoken, or signed, is what defines us as human beings. Intellectual activity, cognition, and all the products that flow from such are indeed based on the unique ability of homo sapiens sapiens to acquire and use a native language. Put another way, the essence of human intel­ lectual and cultural heritage is made possible through the core medium of human language expressed through other media such as pa­ per, audiovisual recordings, microform, and digital media, through which instrumenta­ tion knowledge, information, and culture is passed along and perpetuated both globally in real time and across the generations to time infi nitum. In this sense, linguistics, the discipline dealing with language, is widely considered to be a meta­discipline. Globalization and the advancement of Web technologies have foregrounded mul­ tilingual, multicultural, and multidisciplinary contexts and disciplines. These global and Web contexts place a high demand on lan­ guage­related resources. This article aims at introducing and reviewing language­related Internet sites covering computational linguis­ tics, which is closely interconnected with library and information science, computer science, and engineering, as well as linguis­ tics per se, which itself is interconnected with various disciplines. These sites encompass language data covering field notes, lexical resources, written and spoken corpora, and language fonts and software, together with second­language learning resources, linguist­ mediated digitization activities for preserving endangered human cultures and languages, e­books and e­journals, and more. Meta-sites • The ACL NLP/CL Universe. Hosted by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), this site has been devoted to natural language processing and computational linguistics since 1995. It is a comprehensive listing covering introductory materials on computational linguistics, various resources (bibliography, journals, papers, dictionaries, corpora, and natural language tools), software encompassing knowledge representation and information retrieval, subject­specifi c re­ sources such as speech processing, discourse, semantics, machine translation, and natural language understanding. It also includes list­ ings of academic departments, organizations, conferences, and research labs. The “Browse the Universe” interface allows users to navigate the site to interdisciplinary domains on language, computation, cognition, and information. Access: http://tangra.si.umich. edu/clair/universe­rk/html/u/db/acl/. • Ethnologue. Hosted by SIL Interna­ tional, this site is a veritable guide to the world’s approximately 6,500 languages and cultures, providing a bounty of sociolin­ guistic and demographic data in addition to linguistic information. Special attention is given to lesser­known and studied languages. This site is one of the most comprehensive sites of language resources available, owing