Ural Federal University: University Launched Linguistics Expert Analysis System
The Ural Institute of Humanities at UrFU has developed an electronic environment in which users can create research projects of various types (monolingual and polylingual, individual and collective, for studying verbal and creolized texts). Adapted to the needs of linguistic research, the system is a comfortable space for experienced professionals and young researchers to work.
“The system was created primarily for linguists, both experienced and young researchers – undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students. It helps organize a research project and make the work more comfortable. In this service it is possible to store all collected materials, create classifications of studied objects, and analyze texts and their fragments. “Linguistics” was created over several years, and its concept was constantly adjusted. We tried to respond to the needs of researchers and develop such an electronic environment that any user could easily navigate,” said Yulia Bogoyavlenskaya, professor of the Department of Linguistics and Professional Communication in Foreign Languages.
The number of project participants is not limited, they can be geographically distant from each other, but work together on the same project, solving one or more research tasks at a time. In collective projects it is possible to coordinate work, plan, set deadlines, comment on controversial points in a specially created for the convenience of users chat. In individual projects, the researcher has the “Notes” tool to save comments, reminders and other messages.
If necessary, if the research tasks require it, texts with graphic documents (pictures, photos, cartoons and other images), copied from the browser, can be included in the project and also subjected to their analysis.
In the application, the user can build multilevel classification trees of linguistic and extra-linguistic parameters, according to which he or she plans to analyze objects contained in specific contexts, such as various kinds of constructions, discourse words, metaphors, etc. These contexts with references to the source, text author and date can be obtained on request as a list for a particular parameter in order to control the quality of expert analysis or copy it to the buffer for further insertion into a text document (article, report, term paper, thesis, dissertation and other scientific papers).
The application generates reports important for any linguistic research on the quantitative data obtained during the analysis. In multilingual projects, reports can be compared, in other words, two or more can be viewed at once to compare results.
Linguistics can host both a collection of texts collected independently and fragments of texts – samples, for example, obtained in various corpora.