Combining Documentation and Research: Ongoing Work on an Endangered Language (original) (raw)
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Documenting and researching endangered languages: the Pangloss Collection
The Pangloss Collection is a language archive developed since 1994 at the Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) research group of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientiique (CNRS). It contributes to the documentation and study of the world's languages by providing free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in endangered or under-resourced languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. The Collection is an Open Archive containing media iles (recordings), text annotations, and metadata; it currently contains over 1,400 recordings in 70 languages, including more than 400 transcribed and annotated documents. The annotations consist of transcription, free translation in English, French and/or other languages, and, in many cases, word or morpheme glosses; they are time-aligned with the recordings, usually at the utterance level. A web interface makes these annotations accessible online in an interlinear display format, in synchrony with the sound, using any standard browser. The structure of the XML documents makes them accessible to searching and indexing, always preserving the links to the recordings. Longterm preservation is guaranteed through a partnership with a digital archive. A guiding principle of the Pangloss Collection is that a close association between documentation and research is highly proitable to both. This article presents the collections currently available; it also aims to convey a sense of the range of possibilities they offer to the scientiic and speaker communities and to the general public.
Speech technology for supporting community-based endangered language documentation
2019
We are grateful for the support and generosity of the elders of the Seneca Nation of Indians. Linnea undergrad linguistics RA “I had a difficult time with the ASR, because I spent more time crosschecking the transcription than actually just transcribing.” Julia undergrad linguistics RA “Using ASR, I was able to focus on comparing the audio to the transcription rather than trying to perceive what was being said.”
Boyd Michailovsky, Martine Mazaudon, Alexis Michaud, Séverine Guillaume, Alexandre François & Evangelia Adamou. 2014. Documenting and Researching Endangered Languages: The Pangloss Collection. _Language Documentation & Conservation_ 8 (2014), pp.119-135., 2014
The Pangloss Collection [http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/index\_en.htm\] is a language archive developed since 1994 at the Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) research group of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). It contributes to the documentation and study of the world’s languages by providing free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in endangered or under-resourced languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. The Collection is an Open Archive containing media files (recordings), text annotations, and metadata; it currently contains over 1,400 recordings in 70 languages, including more than 400 transcribed and annotated documents. The annotations consist of transcription, free translation in English, French and/or other languages, and, in many cases, word or morpheme glosses; they are time-aligned with the recordings, usually at the utterance level. A web interface makes these annotations accessible online in an interlinear display format, in synchrony with the sound, using any standard browser. The structure of the XML documents makes them accessible to searching and indexing, always preserving the links to the recordings. Long-term preservation is guaranteed through a partnership with a digital archive. A guiding principle of the Pangloss Collection is that a close association between documentation and research is highly profitable to both. This article presents the collections currently available; it also aims to convey a sense of the range of possibilities they offer to the scientific and speaker communities and to the general public
Utilizing Language Technology in the Documentation of Endangered Uralic Languages
The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which record new spoken language data, digitize available recordings and annotate these multimedia data in order to provide comprehensive language corpora as databases for future research on and for endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Specifically, we describe a script providing interactivity between different morphosyntactic analysis modules implemented as Finite State Transducers and ELAN, a Graphical User Interface tool for annotating and presenting multimodal corpora. Ultimately, the spoken corpora created in our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future. * The order of the authors' names is alphabetical.
2017
These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered languages held in Honolulu, March 6-7, 2017. The workshop itself was co-located and took place after the 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. As the name implies, this is the second workshop held on the topic-the previous meeting was co-located with the ACL main conference in Baltimore, Maryland in 2014. The workshop covers a wide range of topics relevant to the study and documentation of endangered languages, ranging from technical papers on working systems and applications, to reports on community activities with supporting computational components. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together computational researchers, documentary linguists, and people involved with community efforts of language documentation and revitalization to take part in both formal and informal exchanges on how to integrate rapidly evolving language processing methods and tools into efforts of language description, documentation, and revitalization. The organizers are pleased with the range of papers, many of which highlight the importance of interdisciplinary work and interaction between the various communities that the workshop is aimed towards. We received 39 submissions as long papers, short papers, or extended abstracts, of which 23 were selected for this volume (59%). In the proceedings, all papers are either short (≤5 pages) or long (≤9 pages). In addition, the workshop also features presentations from representatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Two panel dicussions on the topic of interaction between computational linguistics and the documentation and revitalization community as well as future planning of ComputEL underlined the demand and necessity of a workshop of this nature.
Internet applications for endangered languages: a talking dictionary of Ainu
2011
There are an estimated 6,900 languages spoken in the world today and at least half of them are under threat of extinction. This is mainly because speakers of smaller languages are switching to other larger languages for economic, social or political reasons, or because they feel ashamed of their ancestral language. The language can thus be lost in one or two generations, often to the great regret of their descendants. Over the past ten years a new field of study called “language documentation” has developed. Language documentation is concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical bases for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of languages. It has developed in response to the urgent need to make an enduring record of the world’s many endangered languages and to support speakers of these languages in their desire to maintain them. It is also fueled by developments in information and media technologies which make documentation and the preservation and dissemin...
Speech technology as documentation for endangered language preservation: The case of Irish
ICPhS, 2015
Developing speech technology such as text-tospeech (TTS), requiring as it does a raft of phonetic and linguistic resources, can provide a powerful way to document endangered languages. Drawing on the experience of the ABAIR initiative, developing such resources for Irish [1], we illustrate how both the technology and the underpinning resources can be exploited in a variety of ways that can contribute to the preservation and revitalisation of these languages. By enabling new avenues of application, they can further help address the particular challenges that face the language users and learners. To maximise the immediate and downstream impact, resource development should ideally involve linguistically transparent, rule-based approaches, rather than the machine learning approaches typical of the commercially driven TTS systems for major world languages.
How usable are digital collections for endangered languages? A review
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2022
Here, we report on pilot research on the extent to which language collections in digital linguistic archives are discoverable, accessible, and usable for linguistic research. Using a test case of common tasks in phonetic and phonological documentation, we evaluate a small random sample of collections and find substantial, striking problems in all domains. Of the original 20 collections, only six had digitized audio files with associated transcripts (preferably phrase-aligned). That is, only 30% of the collections in our sample were even potentially suitable for any type of phonetic work (regardless of quality of recording). Information about the contents of the collection was usually discoverable, though there was variation in the types of information that could be easily searched for in the collection. Though eventually three collections were aligned, only one collection was successfully forcealigned from the archival materials without substantial intervention. We close with recommendations for archive depositors to facilitate discoverability, accessibility, and functionality of language collections. Consistency and accuracy in file naming practices, data descriptions, and transcription practices is imperative. Providing a collection guide also helps. Including useful search terms about collection contents makes the materials more findable. Researchers need to be aware of the changes to collection structure that may result from archival uploads. Depositors need to consider how their metadata is included in collections and how items in the collection may be matched to each other and to metadata categories. Finally, if our random sample is indicative, linguistic documentation practices for future phonetic work need to change rapidly, if such work from archival collections is to be done in future.