HIR001 - Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA)

Research Investment

Researchers: Professor Michael Haugh (Principal investigator)

Brief description Australia is a massively multilingual country, in one of
the world’s most linguistically diverseregions. Significant collections of this
intangible cultural heritage have been amassed, including collections of
Australian Indigenous languages and regional languages of the Pacific, and of
Australian English, as well as collections important for cyber-security
(AusTalk, Australian National Corpus, corpora of regional languages), for
gauging popular sentiment (Australian Twitter Corpus), and for emergency
communication (languages of the region and some Indigenous languages). Many
collections remain under-utilised or at risk, and researchers lack the tools and
skills to exploit their research potential. The Language Data Commons of
Australia (LDaCA) will capitalise on existing infrastructure to secure
vulnerable and dispersed language collections and link these with improved
analysis environments. Establishing an integrated national infrastructure that
supports language research will enable researchers and communities to access and
use nationally significant collections of written, spoken, multimodal and signed
text. The project will improve researchers’ digital skills and raise awareness
of best practice in digital research; render valuable collections of national
significance more FAIR while adhering to CARE principles; and develop the
integrated national technical infrastructure to analyse language collections at
scale. It will support researchers to deliver innovative research outcomes, and
will open up the social and economic possibilities of Australia’s language data
for translational research in the national interest. The project will build
connections to other HASS RDC projects by: developing APIs and text analytics
tools that can be applied to the Trove collections; facilitating text analysis
of aggregated administrative data collections from AusIRISS; and developing a
community driven approach for governance of Indigenous language collections. We
will address the challenge of balancing research needs while respecting
community rights for language/cultural collections; highlight contributions that
language research and HASS disciplines can make to STEM research and
non-academic applications; and position Australia internationally as a leading
contributor of language collections and digital infrastructure.

Amount 1,932,996.00 AUD

Scheme HASS RDC and Indigenous Research Capability\n Program