Documenting Endangered Languages with the WordsEye Linguistics Tool

In this paper, we describe how field lin-guists can use the WordsEye Linguistics Tool (WELT) to study endangered lan-guages. WELT is a tool under devel-opment for eliciting endangered language data and formally documenting a lan-guage, based on WordsEye (Coyne and Sproat, 2001), a text-to-scene generation tool that produces 3D scenes from text in-put. First, a linguist uses WELT to create elicitation materials and collect language data. Next, he or she uses WELT to for-mally document the language. Finally, the formal models are used to create a text-to-scene system that takes input in the en-dangered language and generates a picture representing its meaning.