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FLEx (FieldWorks Language Explorer)

Thu, 05/14/2009 - 14:05 — languist
Your rating: None Average: 3.8 (11 votes)

FieldWorks Language Explorer is the lexical and text tools component of SIL FieldWorks. It is an open source desktop application designed to help field linguists perform many common tasks. It can help you:

  • elicit and record lexical information
  • create dictionaries
  • interlinearize texts
  • analyse discourse features
  • study morphology

 
To see many of the features of FLEx before you download and install it, view the demo movies which are available online.
 

Version

 3.0 (in FW 6.0)

Developer

 SIL

Supported
free

Supported Operating Systems

 Windows, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows 7, Windows 7 x64

Unicode Support
Yes

Suitable tasks
  • SOCIOLINGUISTICS: Surveying and assessing the sociolinguistic situation
  • Collect word lists using IPA transcription and/or audio recording
  • Identify the most frequently used words in a natural text corpus
  • LINGUISTICS
  • Store and edit an electronic notebook of language data in a form conducive to analysis
  • Create and edit a lexical database (modeling morphology if necessary)
  • Validate the structure of lexical data
  • Create and edit a corpus of natural texts
  • Collect, transcribe and translate audiorecordings of natural texts (and other texts/utterances)
  • From the text corpus, look up words in the lexicon
  • Populate the lexical database using rapid data entry (e.g. DDP)
  • Interlinearize natural texts, sharing glosses with a lexical database
  • Interlinearize natural texts without a lexical database
  • Work with lexical data arranged by root (root-based rather than stem-based)
  • Define dictionary entries while grouping them together by semantic domain
  • Run a concordance search to find all occurrences of a given word in a text corpus
  • Supply additional information such as word category, example sentences, lexical relations
  • Test the text corpus against the grammar (e.g. the syntax or discourse)
  • Analyze the discourse structure of each type of discourse in the corpus
  • Organize a grammar for publication
  • Publish linguistic data (e.g. phonetic data and interlinear texts)
  • SCRIPTURE TRANSLATION
  • Interlinearize the translation, glossing it in an LWC
  • Create back-translations in an LWC
  • COMMON: Common Tasks and Foundational Technologies/Utilities
  • Localizable (i.e. user interface can be translated)
  • Version control and backups
  • Supports multiple scripts
  • Supports complex non-Roman scripts
  • Archive data in Unicode in a long-life file format (e.g. XML)
  • Check spelling
  • Check grammar
  • Convert data between Unicode and legacy encodings
  • Convert between formats (e.g. SFM and XML)
  • Do research, look up information
  • A useful template (e.g. for a research grant proposal or linguistic paper, etc.)

Interface Language
English, French, Indonesian, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (simplified), Russian

License
Open Source

Download Page
SIL FieldWorks Standard Edition 6.0
SIL FieldWorks Bible Translators Edition 6.0

Website
http://www.sil.org/computing/fieldworks/flex/index.htm

User Group
FLEx List

Screenshots

Comments

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FLEx

owiba - 04/30/2010 - 06:56
4

Flex is very powerful, but requires a lot of learning. It also requires some programming in order to match the characteristics of the language or language family for which it is being used.

Programming?

dhigby - 05/03/2010 - 13:22

I would say it needs to be configured to the language, but "programming" applies something that the average person couldn't do on their own. I don't find that to be the case at all.

Secondly, the basic data entry of new words does not require much learning. However, the deeper you go into the grammar of a language, the more learning is required to make use of the capabilities of FLEx.



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