Boas contains
knowledge about human language and means of realization of its phenomena
in a number of languages

.......

Boas is the knowledge acquisition component of Expedition. It guides source-language (SL) informants - who need not be linguistic experts - through questions about the ecology (letters, symbols, punctuation, etc.), inflectional morphology, derivational morphology and syntax of their language. It also sets them the task of building a complete bilingual closed-class lexicon and a large bilingual open-class lexicon. Knowledge elicitation is largely driven by an inventory of parameters and values that are traditionally employed to describe natural language: e.g., case (nominative, genitive, dative, etc.), tense (present, past, future, timeless), phrase type (noun phrase, adjective phrase, etc.).

Due to the extensive pedagogical support resident in Boas and its tightly organized method of elictation, Boas has been called "a linguist in the box" - a tool providing practically the same level of assistance as would a human linguistic consultant. The knowledge-elicitation module was named Boas in honor of Franz Boas, a famous field linguist and pioneer of descriptive linguistics in the United States.

Once elicitation is complete, Boas will contain the following types of operational knowledge about SL:

a morphological analysis grammar derived from a morphology learning algorithm that takes as input sample inflectional paradigms provided by the informant;
a syntactic analysis grammar containing information about phrase boundaries, clause structure, etc.;
knowledge about the "ecology" of SL, including the inventory of letters and punctuation, the treatment of dates, numbers and acronyms, and proper name recognition;
a SL-to-English transfer grammar which maps features and grammatical structures from one language to the other;
a SL-to-English dictionary that includes closed-class items (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, etc.), open-class items (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), phrasals, idioms, and proper names.

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