School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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End date: 2021 × Start date: 2021 × Type: Conference Paper ×

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    The Pacific Expansion: Optimizing phonetic transcription of archival corpora
    Billington, R ; Stoakes, H ; Thieberger, N (ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC, 2021)
    For most of the world’s languages, detailed phonetic analyses across different aspects of the sound system do not exist, due in part to limitations in available speech data and tools for efficiently processing such data for low-resource languages. Archival language documentation collections offer opportunities to extend the scope and scale of phonetic research on low-resource languages, and developments in methods for automatic recognition and alignment of speech facilitate the preparation of phonetic corpora based on these collections. We present a case study applying speech modelling and forced alignment methods to narrative data for Nafsan, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu. We examine the accuracy of the forced-aligned phonetic labelling based on limited speech data used in the modelling process, and compare acoustic and durational measures of 17,851 vowel tokens for 11 speakers with previous experimental phonetic data for Nafsan. Results point to the suitability of archival data for large-scale studies of phonetic variation in low-resource languages, and also suggest that this approach can feasibly be used as a starting point in expanding to phonetic comparisons across closely-related Oceanic languages.
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    Developing a workforce to support research reliant on data and compute
    Turpin, A ; Gruba, P ; Pozanenko, A ; Stupnikov, S ; Thalheim, B ; Mendez, E ; Kiselyova, N (CEUR, 2021-01-01)
    We describe the construction, operation and evaluation of the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform; a group of academics whose mission is to support research requiring non-trivial data analysis or compute at the University of Melbourne.
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    AusKidTalk: An Auditory-Visual Corpus of 3- to 12-Year-Old Australian Children's Speech
    Ahmed, B ; Ballard, KJ ; Burnham, D ; Sirojan, T ; Mehmood, H ; Estival, D ; Baker, E ; Cox, F ; Arciuli, J ; Benders, T ; Demuth, K ; Kelly, B ; Diskin-Holdaway, C ; Shahin, M ; Sethu, V ; Epps, J ; Lee, CB ; Ambikairajah, E (ISCA, 2021)
    Here we present AusKidTalk [1], an audio-visual (AV) corpus of Australian children’s speech collected to facilitate the development of speech based technological solutions for children. It builds upon the technology and expertise developed through the collection of an earlier corpus of Australian adult speech, AusTalk [2,3]. This multi-site initiative was established to remedy the dire shortage of children’s speech corpora in Australia and around the world that are sufficiently sized to train accurate automated speech processing tools for children. We are collecting ~600 hours of speech from children aged 3–12 years that includes single word and sentence productions as well as narrative and emotional speech. In this paper, we discuss the key requirements for AusKidTalk and how we designed the recording setup and protocol to meet them. We also discuss key findings from our feasibility study of the recording protocol, recording tools, and user interface.
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    The Language Documentation Quartet
    Musgrave, S ; Thieberger, N (University of Colorado at Boulder, 2021)
    As we noted in an earlier paper (Musgrave & Thieberger 2012), the written description of a language is an essentially hypertextual exercise, linking various kinds of material in a dense network. An aim based on that insight is to provide a model that can be implemented in tools for language documentation, allowing instantiation of the links always followed in writing a grammar or a dictionary, tracking backwards and forwards to the texts and media as the source of authority for claims made in an analysis. Our earlier paper described our initial efforts to encode Heath’s (1984) grammar, texts (1980), and dictionary (1982) of Nunggubuyu, an Australian language from eastern Arnhemland. We chose this body of work because it was written with many internal links between the three volumes. The links are all encoded with textual indexes which looked to be ready to be instantiated as automated hyperlinks once the technology was available. In this paper, we discuss our progress in identifying how the four component parts of a description (grammar, text, dictionary, media, henceforth the quartet) can be interlinked, what are the logical points at which to join them, and whether there are practical limits to how far this linking should be carried. We suggest that the problems which are exposed in this process can inform the development of an abstract or theoretical data structure for each of the components and these in turn can provide models for language documentation work which can feed into hypertext presentations of the type we are developing.