Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System

LiFE Suite

An open-sourced suite to collect, transcribe, annotate, analyse, share, and enrich language data.

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Multiple Data Processing Workflows AI-assisted Data Processing Teams and Collaboration GDPR and DPDP 2023 Compliant AGPL-Licensed Source

1,183projects

105languages

392active users

154institutions

11countries

4,838speakers

01 Case Studies Completed project stories showing how LiFE helped teams finish real language-data work. 02 Showcase Actual datasets, models, apps, demos, and approved public samples built through LiFE. 03 User Manual Workflow guidance from project setup to downloads and team management.

Use cases

How to use LiFE to turn scattered and tedious data processing into an automated pipeline.

From field recordings to searchable resources and archives

Language documentation and analysis pipeline

Start with preparing questionnaires then deploy this on Atekho for field data collection. Atekho allows for both field and follow-up remote data collection workflows. Atekho data is automatically synced to the cloud database for validation and further processing. Once data is validated and accepted, sentential and narrative data can be processed in MATra Lab with AI-assisted transcription, translation, and glossing. This could be used for analysing grammatical structures or writing grammatical descriptions of the language. Lexical data can be processed in LexiLab to produce multimodal, multilingual dictionaries. Finally, all outputs can be packaged for delivery to archives, for printing (especially dictionaries) or other downstream applications.

Prepare multilingual data for model training workflows

Data preparation for AI pipelines

You can start with recording data at scale on Atekho using its crowdsourcing and remote data collection workflows. Once data is collected, it can be processed in MATra Lab to produce AI-ready datasets for training models for speech recognition, machine translation, and other NLP tasks. MATra Lab supports AI-assisted transcription, translation, and custom annotation of all kinds of speech, text, image and video data. Scale up and accelerate your data preparation workflows by setting up multiple teams with 100s of members working in parallel, each with a fine-grained set of permissions, validating the work, managing permissions, and finally exporting the data in a format suitable for training AI models. You can even use Models Studio to train baseline models on your data and evaluate their performance.

Read texts, audio-video and image data, annotate them and generate insights

Digital Humanities and Social Science Research

If you are an influencer or a journalism or a researcher in the humanities or social sciences, you can use integrated AI models in MATra Lab to automatically transcribe and code multimodal and text data. You can combine your secondary materials (such as texts) with primary materials such as automatically transcribed interviews (of the authors or participants), focus group sessions and other research materials on a single platform. And then generate different kinds of visualisations and quantitative analyses describing your research.

Explore more use cases

Capability map

Each LiFE app and feature supports a distinctive part of the language-data workflows.

Atekho

Setup mobile-first and remote linguistic and cultural data collection workflows where enabled for your account.

Mobile capture Field handoff Plan capacity

Distributed field collection

MATra Lab

Manage recordings, speaker metadata and validation. Do AI-assisted transcriptions, translations and annotations.

Audio + metadata Annotation flow Multiple exports

Documentation and corpus preparation

LexiLab

Create, edit, browse, and export lexical resources with forms, senses, variants, glosses, and dictionary views.

Lexeme entry Dictionary browse Structured export

Dictionaries and glossaries

Questionnaires

Build elicitation projects, set up Atekho projects, and export questionnaires to different output formats.

Prompts Exports Downloads

Field elicitation

Models Studio

Train models for ASR, OCR, translation, transliteration, and other tasks using a no-code interface.

No-code training Custom models Fine-tuning

No-code AI development

Analytics

Track project progress, speaker/audio coverage, user contribution, payment readiness, and review status.

Dashboards Coverage Review metrics

Project managers and labs

LipiLab

Work for manuscript digitisation, metadata management, AI-assisted annotation and preparation of critical editions.

Manuscript Annotation Critical edition

Manuscript digitisation

VizTrail

Produce visualizations and multiple quantitative analyses from the prepared multimodal data for research.

Quantitative analysis Visualisations Research

Research data analysis

LaLTeN-GLowS

Outputs for the community including mobile apps, primers, games, grammars and more for giving back to the community.

Mobile apps Games Community outreach

Community engagement

ArivuThunai

Live subtitling of lectures, synthesise course materials, and practice for examinations with AI assistance.

Exam preparation Live subtitling AI assistance

Study and exam preparation

SabhaAssistant

Live subtitling of conferences, seminars, and meetings with AI-assisted generation of reports and minutes.

Events Report generation Meeting minutes

Meetings and events

Teams and sharing

Coordinate contributors, teams, institutional contexts, permissions, and project access.

Teams Fine-grained permissions Institutions

Collaboration and review

Export and delivery

Package transcriptions, lexicons, questionnaires, dictionaries, and selected project data.

Downloads Dictionary exports HF datasets

Reusable outputs

Karya Integration

Manage Karya access codes, fetch history, recordings, and speaker-oriented task flows.

Access codes Recordings fetching Fetch history

Scaled collection tasks

Who it serves

Designed for both academic and applied language work.

Students and faculty

Manage field projects, classroom data, lexicons, questionnaires, and reproducible research outputs.

Institutions and labs

Coordinate teams, share projects, review metadata, and preserve language resources across projects.

Organisations

Use scalable compute, storage, AI workflows, and enterprise customization for multilingual data needs.

From raw material to usable resources

A workspace for the full lifecycle of language data.

Collect Transcribe Annotate Analyse Share Export

Academic credibility

Peer-reviewed work around LiFE.

LiFE is not just a product interface. It sits inside a growing body of publications, demos, and applied research workflows.

Research papers on LiFE

Academic papers presenting LiFE, its architecture, workflows, integrations, or research-facing capabilities.

2025 Field to Model: Pairing Community Data Collection with Scalable NLP through the LiFE Suite Field Matters 2025 Connects community data collection workflows with scalable NLP pipelines through LiFE. 2023 An Open-source Web-based Application for Development of Resources and Technologies in Underresourced Languages NLPOSS 2023 Discusses LiFE as an open-source web application for under-resourced language resource development. 2022 Towards a Unified Tool for Management of Data and Technologies in Field Linguistics and Computational Linguistic - LiFE EURALI @LREC 2022 Presents LiFE as a unified tool for managing language data and technologies.

Research papers using LiFE

Published work where LiFE supported data collection, annotation, resource development, or research workflows.

2024 HarmPot: An Annotation Framework for Evaluating Offline Harm Potential of Social Media Text LREC-COLING 2024 A framework paper connected to annotation and analysis workflows. 2023 Collecting Speech Data for Endangered and Under-resourced Indian Languages SIGUL 2023 Describes speech data collection workflows for endangered and under-resourced Indian languages. 2022 The ComMA Dataset V0.2: Annotating Aggression and Bias in Multilingual Social Media Discourse LREC 2022 Describes development of an annotated multimodal multilingual dataset for automatic identification of misogyny and communnalism in Indian languages.

Demos

Demo papers and public showcases that help evaluators understand LiFE as a working system.

2024 Demo of LiFE: A web app for collection, management and annotation of linguistic data CODS-COMAD 2024 Demo of the upgraded, enhanced version of LiFE Suite and its different modules and components. 2021 Demo of the Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE ICON 2021 The original public demo paper introducing LiFE as a linguistic field data management and analysis system.

Announcements

Know what is changing in and around LiFE.

Join the LiFE Google Group

2026-07-03

Development

Karya workflow updates

Recent development focused on Karya setup, background fetch flows, and recording-management fixes.

2026-06-30

Platform

Background upload support

Upload processing has moved toward background tasks for smoother large-data workflows.

2026-06-28

MATra Lab

Recording duration automation

Recording projects gained improved automatic duration calculation and update flows.

2026-08-26

Development update