LanguageARC: Developing Language Resources Through Citizen Linguistics.

This paper introduces the citizen science platform, LanguageARC, developed within the NIEUW (Novel Incentives and Workflows) project supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1730377. LanguageARC is a community-oriented online platform bringing together researchers and “citizen linguists” with the shared goal of contributing to linguistic research and language technology development. Like other Citizen Science platforms and projects, LanguageARC harnesses the power and efforts of volunteers who are motivated by the incentives of contributing to science, learning and discovery, and belonging to a community dedicated to social improvement. Citizen linguists contribute language data and judgments by participating in research tasks such as classifying regional accents from audio clips, recording audio of picture descriptions and answering personality questionnaires to create baseline data for NLP research into autism and neurodegenerative conditions. Researchers can create projects on Language ARC without any coding or HTML required using our Project Builder Toolkit.