Citing and contributing back

If you use APLS, please cite it! Studies show that research software is under-cited. Not citing research software makes it hard for creators to gauge how often it’s used, understand how to improve it, or get credit when others use it. (Citing APLS is also part of APLS’s terms of use.)

In addition, if you present or publish research based on APLS, we may ask you to contribute back to the corpus so future fellow users can benefit. Our goal is to make contributing back as seamless as possible—simply fill out the “How did you use APLS?” form.

On this page
  1. Citing APLS
    1. Formatted bibliography entries
  2. Contributing back
    1. What we’re looking for
  3. Citing documentation

Citing APLS

Formatted bibliography entries

Style Bibliography entry
Unified style sheet for linguistics Villarreal, Dan, Barbara Johnstone, and Scott Kiesling. . Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (version selector) [open data resource]. https://apls.pitt.edu (accessed June 27, 2025)
APA 7th edition Villarreal, D., Johnstone, B., & Kiesling, S. (). Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (version selector) [Open data resource]. Retrieved June 27, 2025, from https://apls.pitt.edu

Contributing back

Let’s say you’ve downloaded some APLS data and modified or added to it in some way—you’ve coded some sociolinguistic variable, tagged some stances, or corrected a transcription. This is valuable information that future users of APLS could benefit from! If you’ve used APLS in published or ongoing research, please fill out the “How did you use APLS?” form (even if you don’t think you have anything to contribute back), and we’ll contact you with more information about next steps. Finally, if your contribution gets accepted, your name gets added to APLS’s contributors list—a feather in your cap!

What we’re looking for

This covers two main cases:

  • Adding annotations to your own downloaded version of APLS data
    • Note: This doesn’t have to cover the whole corpus, a whole speaker, or even a whole transcript
    • Examples:
      • Coding tokens of a sociolinguistic variable
      • Tagging stretches of interview speech for stances or topics
      • Identifying ideal formant-measurement settings for particular tokens
      • Generating gradient predictions of auto-coded variables
      • Grouping participants into class categories based on education and occupation
  • Correcting issues in current annotations
    • This could cover either human-generated or computer-generated annotations
    • Examples:
      • Identifying transcription errors, or identifying correct transcriptions for passages marked [unclear]
      • Correcting morphemic parses or segmental alignments
      • Running part-of-speech tagging through a different POS algorithm of your choice

In addition, we welcome:

  • Any feedback on APLS’s user interface or this documentation website
  • Requests for particular features
  • Requests for new layers
  • Calling our attention to something that needs troubleshooting

However, you are not obligated to contribute back to the corpus if you use APLS data:

  • To create stimuli for perceptual/experimental research
  • To train some sort of language model
    • Exception: The model results in some annotations of existing APLS data that you can contribute back
  • To inform fieldwork methods in Pittsburgh or other places
  • Completely ‘as is’ without any further annotations or corrections

Citing documentation

In most cases where you want to cite APLS, your citation will be to APLS itself (see above). However, if you need to cite this documentation website, please use one of the following citations:

Style Bibliography entry
Unified style sheet for linguistics Villarreal, Dan, and Jack Rechsteiner. 2025. Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech documentation. https://djvill.github.io/APLS (accessed June 27, 2025)
APA 7th edition Villarreal, D., & Rechsteiner, J. (2025). Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech documentation. Retrieved June 27, 2025, from https://djvill.github.io/APLS