Addressing Variability in Interlinear Glossed Texts with Linguistic Linked Data (2025)

Abstract: In this paper, we identify types of uncertainty in interlinear glossed text (IGT) annotation, a common notation for language data in linguistic research.

## introduction 1.background interlinear glossed text (igt) is a notation commonly used to represent language examples in descriptive and typological linguistics. it is designed to provide an intuitive way of showing language material so that it could be understood without needing to know the language. igt data may consist of any number of layers added under the original text (hence interlinear): word-by-word translation, grammatical meaning of morphemes, transliteration, free translation, etc. some layers have morpheme-by-morpheme alignment between each other, e.g. morpheme segmentation and grammatical meaning of morphemes. consider the following example from tundra yukaghir: @xmath0.3sg additionally to these guidelines, a list of abbreviations (markers) for less common grammatical categories is usually included with the data, especially in cases in which a grammatical category is relevant in a given language but not necessarily cross-linguistically. ## summary and outlook in this paper, we identified three types of variability in igt annotation and, using rdf vocabulary ligt, proposed ways to address them to make the annotations more comparable and compatible across datasets. we also introduced ligt-search, a tool that uses these techniques to allow users search across igt datasets in a flexible way, allowing them to provide their own mappings and additional annotations. in the future, this should become a basis for a user-friendly tool that could combine local and remote data, regardless of annotation inconsistencies and personal preferences.