Information structure in African languages: corpora and tools

Abstract

In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 subsaharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, and further, the corpus tool ANNIS that provides a unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access and the creation of data archives.