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In the last couple of days I was in a kind of clean-up rage and crawled all the tags on our site, edited a few (going to add some exceprts to the yet description-less tags when I have the time) and would like to discuss some cases that seem a bit problematic to me:

  • : I already edited the description of it, but I still find the name pretty difficult to hit on when you haven't seen it beofre. Shouldn't we rather rename it to "language-request" or something similar?
  • Why does this tag even exist - didn't we define such questions as out of the scope of this site? It is now, but once was on-topic and we should just leave the existing questions as-is
  • Seems a bit redundant - remove?
  • It was already discussed here, but without a real solution: What do we want to have this tag for? Do we refer to historical linguistics (then I would rather use the directly), history of linguistic theory (then we should consider renaming it to "history-of-linguistics" or "history-of-theory" or something) or the influence of historical context on the development of languages (but this should then again boil down to or sometimes )? Proposal by Alenanno: rename it to "histocial-context"
  • This is not very expressive - I would rather go with more accurate tags like "ancient-greek" or "ancient-hebrew" etc.
  • This is used pretty unhomogeneously. Most of these questions are about writing systems, unicode or IPA where there is already tags for that; the rest are not really linguistic questions i.m.o. (such as a question about emoticons). The only question with a reasonable use of the tag I found so far is this one, but looking at the other questions tagged with this tag, "symbol" doesn't really help classifying questions into a more or less homogeneous group of interest which makes its need questionable. Should we delete the tag and, if necessary, change the tags of the few remaining question to others? I would suggest using it in the context of semiotics, like in the question I linked, but then we should careful that it doesn't overlap with , etc.
  • - ambiguous again; both used as and - should we better restrict it to one meaning; if so, which one, or should we remove it completely and simply re-tag the existing four questions?
  • - seems to be used very unhomogeneously again - what to do with it? I'd say we use it in the sanse of language variation (dialects, sociolects, ...) - but we need an informative tag wiki then.

  • - only three questions, one about semantics, one about verbs, one about syntax - do we need it? A tag wiki has been suggested, the wrongly tagged questions removed, and more questions tagged correctly

  • is always only used in the sense of (which makes sense since this is a linguistics and not a mathematics site). We now have tag wikis so in the future they will hopefully be used appropriately, but I'm still wondering whether there is a good use for here?

  • - it's either about or any of the other tags (like research questions about English, historical linguistics etc.), so it's not really needed - or we should add a precise tag wiki
  • - This is a typo removed

Additionally, I would suggest merging or synonymising a bunch of tags (is the direction relevant?):

Others that have rather few usage could easily be subsumed under more general terms:

And other tags are so extremely specific in their scope or unique to one particular question used I doubt that they will ever be used so one might actually delete them:

There were some more that were rather specific or seldomly used, but the ones above seemed the most redundant to me.

I don't expect you to discuss extensively on every bullet point I made - a comment on one or a few points or if someone could do the tag synonyms (I don't have enough reputation to do that on my own) would already be nice.

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  • Can we delete the "research" tag?
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 13, 2016 at 12:50
  • @curiousdannii If it overlaps with reference-request, actually yes. Sep 13, 2016 at 12:54
  • I don't know that it's for, it's completely opaque and should be blacklisted rather than made a duplicate.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 13, 2016 at 12:55
  • wonderwort looks like a spelling error for Wanderwort Sep 13, 2016 at 16:33
  • I've fixed lexical-relations, but that one was easy. What will we do for the rest? Have the tag synonyms been suggested yet?
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 28, 2016 at 3:38
  • @jknappen I really disagree with you removing the modality tag from questions, and it wasn't discussed here either. If you think it is a bad tag then you really should post on Meta with some kind of explanation.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 28, 2016 at 14:20
  • @curiousdannii: Modality is a heavily overloaded term. Besides grammatical mood, it can describe the distinction spoken/written/signed or apply to the system of modal verbs. It is not needed as a synonym for "grammatical mood" because of the tag "mood" that is already there and clear in this respect. For the modal verbs, maybe [:tag:modal-verbs] is a good idea, leaving [:tag:modality] for the other meanings of "modality". Sep 28, 2016 at 14:47
  • @curiousdannii BTW, modality is a rather marginal tag, when I stumbled upon it it had only 7 questions tagged, with most of them either double tagged with "mood" and "modality" or just better tagged "mood". Sep 28, 2016 at 14:49
  • @jknappen It may not be very clearly defined on this site, but in the literature, such as Palmer's seminal work Mood and Modality it is clearly defined and distinguished from other terms like mood or modal verbs. It is crucial that it be distinguished from mood..
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 29, 2016 at 0:49
  • @curiousdannii: The problem of the overloading of the term "modality" is not solved by quoting Palmer. And [:tag:modality-as-defined-by-palmer] is not a really usable tag. From my perspective (which includes curating metadata for digital resources) modality is predominantly dealing with the written/spoken/singed/multimodal contrast. Sep 29, 2016 at 9:59
  • @jknappen That's a completely different sense of the word, one which hasn't been used very much on this site so far. But it would still be worth posting on a new post I just made about these tags so the rest of the community can weigh in.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Sep 29, 2016 at 10:20

3 Answers 3

3

This is my opinion on your proposals.


Legend:

Proposed main tag.
Proposed for deletion.

Note: If none is highlighted, I am not expressing a particular preference towards either.


  1. - Do we need an own tag for this? This field is sufficiently covered by and i.m.o.
  2. and - aren't these subsumed under ?
  3. - only two questions - subsume under ?
  4. - only two quetsions - subsume under ?
  5. - I have never heard that term before, couldn't we just subsume this under ?
  6. : I already edited the description of it, but I still find the name pretty difficult to hit on when you haven't seen it beofre. Shouldn't we rather rename it to "language-request" or something similar?
  7. Why does this tag even exist - didn't we define such questions as out of the scope of this site?
  8. Seems a bit redundant - remove?
  9. It was already discussed here, but without a real solution: What do we want to have this tag for? Do we refer to historical linguistics (then I would rather use the directly), history of linguistic theory (then we should consider renaming it to "history-of-linguistics" or "history-of-theory" or something) or the influence of historical context on the development of languages (but this should then again boil down to or sometimes )?
  10. This is not very expressive - I would rather go with more accurate tags like "ancient-greek" or "ancient-hebrew" etc.
  11. This is used pretty unhomogeneously. Most of these questions are about writing systems, unicode or IPA where there is already tags for that; the rest are not really linguistic questions i.m.o. (such as a question about emoticons). The only question with a reasonable use of the tag I found so far is this one, but looking at the other questions tagged with this tag, "symbol" doesn't really help classifying questions into a more or less homogeneous group of interest which makes its need questionable. Should we delete the tag and, if necessary, change the tags of the few remaining question to others?
  12. - ambiguous again; both used as and - should we better restrict it to one meaning; if so, which one, or should we remove it completely and simply re-tag the existing four questions?
  13. - seems to be used very unhomogeneously again - what to do with it?
  14. - only three questions, one about semantics, one about verbs, one about syntax - do we need it?
  15. - This is a typo
  1. Yes, it can be removed.
  2. Yes, they should be all synonym tags of .
  3. Yes.
  4. Uhm, yes.
  5. Study of place names, although maybe it should be . I think it should be at best a synonym of , since this is also the main tag I proposed for .
    lemontree: If we make it synonyms, does this make sure that questions tagged don't somewhere show up as ?
  6. It sounds like a meta-tag, but I'm not sure, so I may leave it for the time being.
    lemontree: It is a meta-tag, but used pretty often (5 times already only this month) so I would definitely keep it, just thuoght a more intuitive name would help new users use it.
  7. questions may be kept (not sure we ruled on them being banned in all cases), but I'd be strongly in favor of setting restrictions on how to handle them. In case these already exist, upgrade them.
    lemontree: I don't think existing questions should be deleted either, but maybe to prevent new questions (it's alreay said in the help center, but when users see that a tag exists they might think such questions are still okay) we could place an information to the tag wiki?
  8. Yes, should be removed. We already have to distinguish. Linguistics is primarily about natural languages anyway.
  9. I may agree with Aaron's proposal . It sounds like a nice substitute for which seems very vague.
    lemontree: Yes, this sounds good.
  10. Agreed. It should be removed in favor of more specific tags, like the ones you suggested.
  11. Not sure about deleting it, but it needs to be seen how it could be used. The concept of symbols is not all external to Linguistics.
    lemontree: I would suggest using it in the context of semiotics, like in the question I linked, but then we should careful that it doesn't overlap with , etc.
  12. The linguistic term is , so we should delete . It's also redundant.
    lemontree: The tag is not always used in the sense of markedness, some uses are about moprhological marking. But it's only four questions in total anyway, so we could just re-tag them.
  13. We should write a decent tag wiki to describe how to properly use it, but as a concept it is valid, so we should keep it.
    lemontree: So we should stick to a use in the sense of language variation (like dialects or sociolects)?
  14. Lexical semantics is a subfield of semantics, so maybe this one might be redundant. But it's a tricky one because the concept it encompasses is huge.
    lemontree: Since it has only been used three times in total, I think it's no problem to delete it despite it being a subfield of another field. If we want to keep it, we should go with a good tag wiki or at least a better name (like "lexical-semantics"), because "lexical-relations" is a bit vague.
  15. Remove, of course.

Synonym tags

Agree

Disagree

  • (doesn't seem useful)
    - (Not synonyms. Computational linguistics is not nlp)
    lemontree: I am aware that they are actually not synonymous, but we already defined them as tag synonyms - see here. So should we delete and leave the other two as-is?
  • - (one is the subject study of the other)
    lemontree: Again, I know they are not identical by definition, but as for the use on this site, in which question context couldn't both of the tags be used?
  • - (thematic roles may refer to theta role, but also to thematic relations, so while the two tags refer to expressions that are sometimes used interchangeably, they can be distinguished.)
    lemontree: Again, the question is whether they will actually be used diferently. But okay, let's keep that one like this.
  • - (not the same area)
    lemontree: So far, all of the software-tagged questions are about NLP tools. But skimming through the questions, possibly the difference is that the former is usually rather requests for existing tools, while the latter is used for problems in creating NLP software? If so, I'd be okay with leaving them separately, but then we should be more specific about theird intended usage in the tag wikis.

Unsure/Other

- - - -

I'd keep , although I'm not sure they're synonyms with , since the former is about documentation, papers, essays and so on, while the latter is about raw material (corpora, etc).
lemontree: That distinction seems useful. If we write proper wikis, we could divide them accordingly.

- -

I'm not very sure about this. The first and third could be synonyms but they overlap with the second one, at times.
lemontree: Yes, that's a bit difficult. Let's wait for some more opinions maybe.

-

May agree with this, but I'm not sure meaning is always used in this way. Maybe it could be deleted, seems like a redundant tag.
lemontree: I guess most of the time it is used in this way, in the other contexts it was wrong anyway. So I'd be in favour of either merging it with semantics or deleting it and, if necessary, re-tag existing questions.

-

Not sure how to tackle these, but I may agree on making them synonyms if it is shown they are always used as such on the site.
lemontree: Where are they not used interchangeably on this site?

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  • Thank you. I edited my comments into your answer, seemed the cleanest solution to me. Sep 12, 2016 at 18:09
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Thank you for your work in identifying all these potential duplicate tags and problem tags!

On the nlp/computational tags:

I disagree with the current synonym of and . As I wrote before corpus analysis is computation but not natural language processing (if that has the normal meaning of machine parsing and interpretation). There are many statistical approaches to linguistics which have nothing to do with nlp. And I also disagree with merging or with either - there are useful tools which don't fit with either nlp or comp, for example for lexicography!

Unless I say otherwise I agree with your synonym suggestions. But, if a tag is clear it shouldn't be deleted even if it is only rarely used.

: this should only be for the study of hyponymy, synonymy etc. It looks like only one of the three questions for this tag is actually about that though. Perhaps there are others which are missing the tag.

- : Probably these should be synonyms, but in some frameworks they could be quite different. But other tags could clarify that, so it's probably okay...

- : noting what Alenanno wrote above (and my own quick Wikiing), I think it might be good to switch to and tags.

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I won't go through the entire list at the moment. I'll come back to it over the next couple of days. But these are my comments so far:

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