Open for Comments: Linguistics Data Interest Group Charter Statement

Data are fundamental to the field of linguistics. Examples drawn from natural languages provide a foundation for claims about the nature of human language, and validation of these linguistic claims relies crucially on these supporting data. Yet, while linguists have always relied on language data, they have not always facilitated access to those data. Publications typically include only short excerpts from data sets, and where citations are provided, the connections to the data sets are usually only vaguely identified. At the same time, the field of linguistics has generally viewed the value of data without accompanying analysis with some degree of skepticism, and thus linguists have murky benchmarks for evaluating the creation, curation, and sharing of data sets in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.This disconnect between linguistics publications and their supporting data results in much linguistic research being unreproducible, either in principle or in practice. Without reproducibility, linguistic claims cannot be readily validated or tested, rendering their scientific value moot. In order to facilitate the development of reproducible research in linguistics, The Linguistics Data Interest Group plans to develop the discipline-wide adoption of common standards for data citation and attribution. In our parlance citation refers to the practice of identifying the source of linguistic data, and attribution refers to mechanisms for assessing the intellectual and academic value of data citations.