1,721,090 research outputs found
Language Preservation 2.0: Crowdsourcing oral language documentation using mobile devices
Full text linkIn crude quantitative terms, Zipf’s law tells us that documentation of something as simple as word usage requires several million words of text or several hundred hours of speech, in a wide variety of genres and styles. The only way to achieve this goal for the majority of the world’s languages is to collect speech. Speech has the added advantage of providing information about phonetics, phonology, and prosody. Speech is also the primary register for dialogue, the most common form of language use. We argue that a combination of community outreach, crowdsourcing techniques, and mobile/web technologies make it relatively easy to collect hundreds or thousands of hours of speech (Callison-Burch and Dredze, 2010; Hughes et al., 2010; Anon 2010).
On its own, this would leave us with a large archive of uninterpreted audio recordings and – once the languages are no longer spoken – an onerous and unverifiable decipherment problem. To avoid this problem and to ensure interpretability, there must be a documentary record that includes translation into a major language. We take as our guide the current typical practice in documentary linguistics, which is to record and report data as interlinear glossed text.
To this end, we add two layers of audio annotation to the primary recordings. The first layer is careful respeaking, or “audio transcription,” in which native speakers listen to the recordings phrase by phrase, and respeak each phrase slowly and carefully. The second layer is oral translation, in which bilingual speakers produce phrase-by-phrase interpretation of the original recordings into a widely-spoken contact language such as English. This combination of respeaking and interpreting constitutes an “acoustic Rosetta stone” which, over time, will grow to a sufficient size to allow open-ended analysis of the language even when it is no longer spoken, including new methods for developing automatic phonetic recognizers and automatic translation systems (Liberman et al., 2013, Lee et al., 2013, Anon 2013).
We will demonstrate a novel way to work with the speakers of endangered languages to collect these spoken language annotations and interlinear glossed texts on a large scale. Our approach addresses key issues in such areas as informed consent, quality control, workflow management, and the diverse technological situations of linguistic fieldwork. Our work promises to speed up the process of preserving the world’s languages and enable future study of these languages and access to knowledge that is captured in archived speech recordings.
References
Chris Callison-Burch and Mark Dredze. Creating speech and language data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, pages 1–12. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010. URL http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/ W10-0701.
Thad Hughes, Kaisuke Nakajima, Linne Ha, Atul Vasu, Pedro J. Moreno, and Mike LeBeau. Building transcribed speech corpora quickly and cheaply for many languages. In INTERSPEECH 2010, 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, pages 1914–1917. ISCA, 2010.
Mark Liberman, Jiahong Yuan, Andreas Stolcke, Wen Wang, and Vikramjit Mitra (2013). Using multiple versions of speech input in phone recognition, ICASSP.
Chia-ying Lee, Yu Zhang, and James Glass (2013). Joint learning of phonetic units and word pronunciations for ASR. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 182–192. Association for Computational Linguistics
OLAC: Accessing the world's language resources
Full text linkLanguage resources are the bread and butter of language documentation and linguistic investigation. They include the primary objects of study such as texts and recordings, the outputs of research such as dictionaries and grammars, and the enabling technologies such as software tools and interchange standards. Increasingly, these resources are maintained and distributed in digital form. Searching on the web for language resources in many languages is a hit-and-miss affair for three reasons: (i) resources are housed in archives that have never put their catalog online, (ii) resources are exposed online but are hidden behind form-based interfaces such that search engines cannot find them, or (iii) resources are exposed to online search engines but they are described in ad hoc ways so that searches do not retrieve desired results with precision. The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is addressing these problems by building on digital library standards to provide a standard format for describing language resources, which makes use of standardized identifiers for languages, linguistic data types, and other things of particular interest to linguists. For instance, all resources from all archives that are in or about the same language use the same three-letter language code from the ISO 639-3 standard. OLAC also provides a portal that permits users to simultaneously query the holdings of the three dozen participating language archives in a single search. Since resource description uses precise language identifiers, a search for a particular language return all and only the relevant resources. However, the current usage and coverage of OLAC is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more linguists should be using it to find many more resources. This paper describes research that is being done to make language resources maximally accessible to linguists. We describe new methods for greatly improving search access to archived language resources, new services that encourage language archives to use best common practices to produce resource descriptions that are maximally useful for searching, and new data providers that use digital library services and web-mining technologies to find language resources in the library, institutional repository, and web domains
Curating lexical databases for minority languages
Full text linkOne of the biggest challenges in compiling a dictionary of a minority language is managing the large quantity of lexical data. Decisions about the format and content of the dictionary or the orthography typically evolve over the years that such projects usually take. This results in inconsistencies between older and newer entries. Revising the data for publication as a dictionary introduces further inconsistencies as does having multiple contributors and/or editors. Proofreading a lexical database takes a great deal of time and the richer its structure the more this is the case. The tools described in this presentation significantly reduce this effort. Tools developed for checking the consistency of the lexical database in the Iu Mien—Chinese—English dictionary project have proven extremely helpful. Two basic approaches are used: 1) use of a program written to check for likely errors that scans the lexical database and produces an error report that is used by a lexicographer to make appropriate corrections. 2) outputting the lexical data in alternate forms that make it easier for the lexicographer to spot problem areas. These alternative forms include the reverse indexes and views structured according to semantic domains. The Iu Mien—Chinese—English dictionary project, like many minority language dictionary projects, uses SIL's Toolbox software. It is very flexible software but its capabilities to enforce consistency are quite limited. Some parts of the approach described here are specific to MDF (Multi-Dictionary Formatter) lexical databases in Toolbox but will be equally useful for other MDF databases. Other parts are specific to each of the three languages involved but will be useful for non-Toolbox lexical databases. Every dictionary is unique and this applies not only to content of the entries but also the decisions about how entries should be arranged to suit the languages involved. Other decisions about the structure are likely to be made differently even in other dictionaries of the same languages. It is the way that each dictionary combines themes that are found in many dictionaries that makes them unique, e.g. to be root based or not, to have include subentries. Therefore our approach is to use a toolkit based approach to curating lexical databases. This allows checking techniques to be mixed and matched to suit the unique aspects of a lexical project. The checking software is written in Python and relies on the toolbox module in NLTK (The Natural Language Toolkit http://nltk.sourceforge.net)
Treasure Language Storytelling: Cross-cultural Language Recognition and Wellbeing
No full textThe dominant “monolingual mindset” in many anglophone countries rewards the use of English only, at the cost of other languages, by assuming that competence in one language inhibits competence in another. This does harm to historically traumatized indigenous and immigrant groups, especially accompanied by racism, classism, and assimilation pressures (1). However, there is opportunity for building connections between communities by strengthening small languages and, we hypothesize, for increasing community wellbeing. The colocation of immigrant and indigenous communities in cities opens the possibility for building solidarity across language communities, and for sharing treasure languages with mainstream monolingual audiences. An upwelling of interest in the storytelling genre has created eager audiences, primed to listen respectfully and witness the storyteller’s transformation while sharing their story. Treasure Language Storytelling brings indigenous and immigrant people together to share stories in original languages, and then translate them into a language of wider communication such as English. A panel of language champions also discusses maintaining language in their communities. Speakers have typically never been publicly recognized as speakers of their languages, and report that it is extraordinary to be acknowledged. Some renew their resolve to speak their languages with their children. By-products include high quality video recordings of the stories, evidence of the storytellers’ bravery and skill, that add to the documented materials for the language. It’s been shown that knowledge of heritage language (2, 3), as well as participation in language revitalization work can serve as protective health factors. As we have refined Treasure Language Storytelling, we now investigate the degree to which this approach also can promote individual healing and community wellbeing. Audience responses like the following have further bolstered our hypothesis (4): "After the event, I could see the potential for healing. I thought I knew one of the storytellers, but I realized when he told his story I only knew part of him. I felt like I was taken back with him to his country, instead of him being in my world. There is much more to him than what I know of him here. That's where there’s value for community members and storytellers." —Andrea VanDerWerf, Melaleuca Refugee Centre staff We will present the results of our investigation into the impact of Treasure Language Storytelling on community wellbeing. The work will involve developing evaluation measures for storytelling events and piloting several school-based treasure language appreciation activities. (1) De Leo D, Ratkowska KA. Suicide in Immigrants: An Overview. Open Journal of Medical Psychology, 2013, 2, 124-133 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojmp.2013.23019 Published Online July 2013 at http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojmp. (2) Whalen DH, Moss M and Baldwin D. Healing through language: Positive physical health effects of indigenous language use [version 1; referees: 1 approved with reservations]. F1000Research 2016, 5:852 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.8656.1) (3) McIvor O, Napoleon A. Language and Culture as Protective Factors for At-Risk Communities. Journal de la santé autochtone, novembre 2009. (4) More about the events, including additional quotes, at https://treasurelanguage.or
Equipping university students to document their ancestral languages
No full textThis paper describes an experiment with “Basic Oral Language Documentation” involving students from three universities in Papua New Guinea. Students recorded, transcribed and translated a sample of oral literature from their ancestral language, using digital voice recorders. We report a variety of challenges and the methods we used to address them
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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