SIL (Larry Hayashi,
Gary Simons, Terry Gibbs)
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) has enormous
experience in providing tools and data formats for use in primary linguistic description. LinguaLinks
is "an electronic productivity support system for language workers," based on the CELLAR
object-oriented "Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary and Anthropological Research.",
including linguistics tools. Other SIL
software tools are Speech Analyser and Speech Manager,
Windows programs for labelling speech files and for searching a database of labelled speech
files; Shoebox, for interlinear text
annotation and its predecessor, IT. SIL also has an SGML based annotation format named PTEXT
("parsed text") described in this paper.