Developing Language Resources with Citizen Linguistics in Austria – A Case Study

Language resources are a major ingredient for the advancement of language technologies. Citizen linguistics can help to create language resources and annotate language resources, not only for the improvement of language technologies, such as machine translation but also for the advancement of linguistic research. The (language) resources covered in this article are a corpus related to the Question of the Month project strand, which was initially aimed at co-creation in citizen linguistics and a partially annotated database of pictures of written text in different languages found in the public sphere. The number of participants in these project strands differed significantly. Especially those activities that were related to data collection (and analysis) had a significantly higher number of contributions per participant. This especially held true for the activities with (prize) incentives. Nevertheless, the activities of the Question of the Month could reach a higher number of participants, even after the co-creation approach was no longer followed. In addition, the Question of the Month brought research gaps and new knowledge to light and challenged existing paradigms and practices. These are especially important for the advancement of scholarly research. Citizen linguistics can help gather and analyze linguistic data, including language resources, in a short period of time. Thus, it may help increase the access to and availability of language resources.