Questions to Help Evaluate Linguistic Tools

BIFoCAL document

This document is intended to serve as a series of useful questions to think about when choosing a tool for producing linguistic data in digital from. The questions are oriented to a wide-range of needs that the general linguist might have.

Accompanying this document is a series of reviews of some popular tools. These may be useful just so that you can see how someone else has reviewed a particular tool, or to serve as a guide for evaluating a tool for which there is no review available. If you would like to do your own review of a tool which is not reviewed and have it posted here, please contact .

How does this tool store and export data?

• Is the basic storage format of this tool based on a proprietary standard (like a Microsoft Word document or a FileMaker database) or a non-proprietary standard (like a plain text file, a Shoebox file, or an XML file)?
• If the basic storage format is proprietary, what sorts of options are there for exporting the data into a non-proprietary format?
• How flexible are the export options? Is it possible to export just a subset of the data?

What types of data will you be working with?

Some common types of data linguists work with:

• Lexical data
• Datasets (structured data, like a paradigm)
• Primary texts
• Descriptive text (narrative text describing basic data)
• Audio data
• Video data

No one tool can work with all these kinds of data, and most tools are specialized only to work with a subset of them. It is good to make a list of the sorts of data you will be working with before choosing any tool--this will help you decide which tool or tools is the best match for your needs.

How will you be annotating and marking up your data?

Things to consider:

• Will you be parsing and interlinearizing texts?
• Will you need to align transcriptions to audio or video data?
• Will you need to gloss your data with multiple languages?

Parsing, interlinearizing, and aligining are all fairly specialized functions. Not many tools can do these things well.

Will you need to work with special characters?

If you will only need to use basic, unaccented characters, any tool should be fine. If you will need special characters (accented characters, non-Roman character sets, etc.), your options become more limited. It's best to use a tool which supports the Unicode character encoding standard.

How will you input your data?

Things to consider:

• How will you be able to input your data? Will you have access to the internet, or will you have to work offline?
• Will you be the sole inputter of the data or will you be working collaboratively?
• Will you be working on multiple platforms?

Different tools make doing the things listed above easier or more difficult. So, it is good to think about how you will be inputting and marking up your data before you choose your software tool.

What kinds of resources do you intend to produce with your data?

Some different kinds of resources often produced based on basic data:

• Linguistic documents (dictionary, grammar, texts)
• Hard copies
• Electronic versions
• Online/Searchable versions
• Different versions for different audiences (linguists, speakers, etc.)

Most tools will allow to fairly easily make hard copies or electronic versions of your documents (though this may require use of a second or third tool). Making online/searchable versions is not as common a type of functionality nor is making different versions of the same document. If these are priorities, one should make sure the tool one uses makes the creation of such resources as simple as possible.

What sorts of analysis will you do on your prepared data?

Common analysis requirements

• Sorting
• Searching
• Examining the data with different views
• Concordancing
• Counting
• Cross-language comparison

Some of these types of analysis, like searching or selection of a subset of the data, are features of almost every tool. Others are less common and, if they are priorities, they should factor into consideration of which tool to use.

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