1. ViCoS Visualising Conceptual Spaces
Claus Zinn
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Lexus/ViCoS workshop, April 2nd. 2009, Nijmegen

2. Language Documentation
Aims:
to create representative, long-lasting, multipurpose record of languages
to maintain, consolidate or revitalize endangered languages
contributes to description of cultural elements of a language community
How can we increase cultural aspect?
How can we engage community members?

3. Language Documentation
Paper dictionaries’ limited usefulness in language maintenance & language revival (Manning et al., 2000)
Speech community may prefer explicit semantic links, possibly of a wide variety of types
introducing Conceptual Spaces, where concepts are
related to others
anchored in language
illustrated with multimedia
Visualizing Conceptual Spaces
Let us briefly focus on data enrichment, situated at the 3rd level of the LAT framework, and the ViCoS tool. An important motivation behind ViCoS is that dictionaries, as they may be constructed with LEXUS, are only of limited use when it comes to maintaining or even reviving a language. ViCoS extends LEXUS in allowing users to make explicit the semantic relations between lexical entries and the concepts they denote. We believe that such functionality will be of interest for linguists but, in particular, for speech community members. They may be less interested the linguistic aspects of a language and more interested in conceptual spaces, where concepts can be related to each other, naturally anchored in the language to express them, and where they can be illustrated with multimedia objects.

4. Existing lexical resource is starting point
ViCoS
Existing lexical resource is starting point
Words offer key access
ViCoS is technology to link words  and the associations they evoke  to other words
Ease-of-use to empower community members to
actively describe their language & culture
and to learn from such resources
resources targeted for human consumption
Resulting Conceptual Spaces = sort of informal ontology of fuzzily-defined concepts and relationships
but where concept nodes are anchored in corresponding formal resources (lexica)