Cleaning up the tags

Question

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:

• list-of-languages: 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?
• language-identification 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
• natural-languages Seems a bit redundant - remove?
• history 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 historical-linguistics 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 historical-linguistics or sometimes sociolinguistics)? Proposal by Alenanno: rename it to "histocial-context"
• ancient This is not very expressive - I would rather go with more accurate tags like "ancient-greek" or "ancient-hebrew" etc.
• symbol 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 writing-systems, ipa etc.
• marking - ambiguous again; both used as markedness and morphology - 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?

• variation - 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.

• lexical-relations - 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

• numbers is always only used in the sense of numerals (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 numbers here?

• research - it's either about reference-request 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
• synatx - This is a typo removed

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

• resources - resource-request - online-resources - reference-request - references Proposal by Alenanno: reference-request for essays, papers etc, resource-request for corpora etc. - I find that a useful distrinciton. What about the rest then?
• vocabulary - lexicon
• word-classes - parts-of-speech
• constructed-language - conlang
• grammatical-number - number
• origin-of-language - evolutionary-linguistics
• computer-science - computational-linguistic - nlp I think we'd need to discuss the current tag synonymy of computational-linguistics and nlp in a separate thread, opinions on that apparently vary
• morphemes - morphology - one is the subject of study of the other, but in which question context couldn't both of the tags be used?
• discourse - discourse-analysis
• stops - plosives
• writing - writing-systems
• proper-nouns - proper-names - names
• thematic-roles - theta-role agreed with what Alenanno wrote
• meaning - semantics
• diachronic - historical-linguistics or language-change
• constituency - constituents
• annotated-data - annotation
• dependency - dependency-grammar
• slavic - slavic-languages
• software - nlp - 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.
• tools - nlp - same as with software

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

• sociophonetics - Do we need an own tag for this? This field is sufficiently covered by sociolinguistics and phonetics i.m.o.
• graphemics and diacritics - aren't these subsumed under writing-systems?
• dialect-mapping - only two questions - subsume under dialects?
• prestige - only two quetsions - subsume under sociolinguistics?
• toponmastics - I have never heard that term before, couldn't we just subsume this under proper-names?

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:

• spe
• wonderwort (What is this? jknappen says it looks like a misspelling of "wanderwort" - I'd say we don't need that one, is sufficiently covered by etymology already)
• philology
• translation-quality
• nominalisation
• grammatical

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.

Answer 1

This is my opinion on your proposals.

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Legend:

example Proposed main tag.
example Proposed for deletion.

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

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1. sociophonetics - Do we need an own tag for this? This field is sufficiently covered by sociolinguistics and phonetics i.m.o.
2. graphemics and diacritics - aren't these subsumed under writing-systems?
3. dialect-mapping - only two questions - subsume under dialects?
4. prestige - only two quetsions - subsume under sociolinguistics?
5. toponmastics - I have never heard that term before, couldn't we just subsume this under proper-names?
6. list-of-languages: 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. language-identification Why does this tag even exist - didn't we define such questions as out of the scope of this site?
8. natural-languages Seems a bit redundant - remove?
9. history 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 historical-linguistics 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 historical-linguistics or sometimes sociolinguistics)?
10. ancient This is not very expressive - I would rather go with more accurate tags like "ancient-greek" or "ancient-hebrew" etc.
11. symbol 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. marking - ambiguous again; both used as markedness and morphology - 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. variation - seems to be used very unhomogeneously again - what to do with it?
14. lexical-relations - only three questions, one about semantics, one about verbs, one about syntax - do we need it?
15. synatx - This is a typo

1. Yes, it can be removed.
2. Yes, they should be all synonym tags of writing-systems.
3. Yes.
4. Uhm, yes.
5. Study of place names, although maybe it should be toponymy. I think it should be at best a synonym of proper-nouns, since this is also the main tag I proposed for proper-names.
   lemontree: If we make it synonyms, does this make sure that questions tagged proper-names don't somewhere show up as toponymy?
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. language-identification 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 constructed-languages to distinguish. Linguistics is primarily about natural languages anyway.
9. I may agree with Aaron's proposal historical-context. It sounds like a nice substitute for history 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 writing-systems, ipa etc.
12. The linguistic term is markedness, so we should delete marking. 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

• vocabulary - lexicon
• word-classes - parts-of-speech
• constructed-language - conlang
• grammatical-number - number (not used)
• origin-of-language (not very useful) - evolutionary-linguistics
• discourse (doesn't seem useful) - discourse-analysis
• stops - plosives
• proper-nouns - proper-names - names
• diachronic (redundant) - historical-linguistics or language-change
• constituency - constituents
• annotated-data - annotation
• tools - nlp (or computational-linguistics)
• slavic - slavic-languages (former used only in two questions)

Disagree

• computer-science (doesn't seem useful)
  computational-linguistic - nlp (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 computer-science and leave the other two as-is?
• morphemes - morphology (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 - theta-role (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.
• software - nlp (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

resources - resource-request - online-resources - reference-request - references

I'd keep reference-request, although I'm not sure they're synonyms with resource-request, 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.

writing - writing-systems - written-language

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.

meaning - semantics

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.

dependency - dependency-grammar

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?

Answer 2

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 nlp and computational-linguistics. 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 software or tools 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.

lexical-relations: 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.

vocabulary - lexicon: 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...

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

Answer 3

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:

• language-identification I vote to leave this as it is. Such questions are considered off topic now, but that was not the case earlier. We have quite a few asked, answered, and accepted posts on the topic.

• natural-languages, history, ancient, symbol, marking, variation, variation, variation, variation, lexical-relations I agree with removing these. But let's wait for other people to give their own opinions.

• synatx removed. In general, if you find typos, I don't think you need to ask anyone to fix it.