As the digital era continues to evolve, more and more different language resources, tools, and technologies for Slovene are becoming freely available online. With this progress, the possibilities for researching the Slovene language are also changing: the number and variety of available resources is increasing, as is the number of potential users. The authors of language resources have been successfully meeting the challenges of the digital medium, and have started to pay more attention to making their resources freely available and in different tools to ensure wider usability. However, in reality, the results often fall short of their true potential, as wider dissemination and training of users typically lies outside the scope of the projects in which such resources are developed.
We have developed The Portal for the Presentation of Slovene Language Resources and Tools to make dissemination easier for the authors of the resources, and to provide the users with an overview of available features. The main novel contribution of the portal are video tutorials that present in a concise and straightforward way the purpose, content, and structure of various freely available online language resources. Also available are tutorials that show specific examples of language problems that can be answered by the resource in question. The tutorials are prepared in a way so they can be watched on different devices with different screen sizes. In addition, the users have the option to watch them with Slovene or English subtitles.
The portal is a result of two smaller projects funded in 2014 and 2015 by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia under the Public call for funding projects focused on the presentation, promotion and development of the Slovene language. In 2015, a special promotional activity The Resource of the Month was conducted, where several selected resources were presented with interesting facts, language statistics, interviews with the authors, ideas for the use of the resources in the classrooms, and so forth.
Currently, the portal provides tutorials for the following resources:
- Gigafida, the reference corpus of written Slovene (corpus; tutorial),
- GOS, the reference corpus of spoken Slovene (corpus; tutorial),
- Šolar, the developmental corpus of student writing with teacher corrections (corpus; tutorial),
- Dictionary portal Fran (portal; tutorial),
- Dictionary portal Termania (portal; tutorial),
- IMP language resources for historical Slovene (project; tutorial),
- Signor, the corpus of Slovene sign language (project; tutorial),
- Razvezani jezik, collaborative dictionary of Slovene slang (dictionary; tutorial),
- ISJFR ZRC SAZU Language council (homepage; tutorial),
- ISJFR ZRC SAZU Terminology council (homepage; tutorial),
- Pedagogical grammar portal (portal; tutorial),
- Sloleks, morphological lexicon (lexicon; tutorial),
- Obeliks, morphosyntactic tagger (program; tutorial),
- Digitized older Slovene orthographies (e-reader; tutorial),
- Digitized older Slovene grammars (e-reader; tutorial).
If you like the idea and its implementation, we would appreciate your support, as well as comments and suggestions for further improvements. Join our Facebook page or contact us at info@trojina.si. Enjoy!
The authors of the portal are Špela Arhar Holdt, Kaja Dobrovoljc, and Iztok Kosem.
ARHAR HOLDT, Špela, DOBROVOLJC, Kaja, KOSEM, Iztok. Predstavitveni portal spletnih jezikovnih virov za slovenščino. V: ERJAVEC, Tomaž (ur.), FIŠER, Darja (ur.). Zbornik konference Jezikovne tehnologije in digitalna humanistika, 29. september – 1. oktober 2016, Filozofska fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani, Ljubljana, Slovenija = Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities, September 29th – October 1st, 2016 Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, 2016, str. 27-31. http://www.sdjt.si/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JTDH-2016_Arhar-et-al_Predstavitveni-portal-spletnih-jezikovnih-virov-za-slo.pdf.