School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemLD Tools and Methods Summit Report( 2016)This document provides an overview of the main points arising from discussion at the Language Documentation Tools and Methods Summit (http://bit.ly/LDsummit2016) held at the University of Melbourne on 1-3 June 2016 and convened by Nick Thieberger and Simon Musgrave for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, funded by the Australian Research Council. Invited participants were asked to consider key issues that were pre-circulated and then prepare discussion points for the meeting. Each theme leader took notes and they are summarised below, with links to the original notes also provided below. There is necessarily some overlap between the reports on group discussions.
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ItemARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language: Indigenous Linguistic & Cultural Heritage Ethics Document(ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, 2017)A significant part of the Centre’s research is reliant on the participation of indigenous communities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, and actively contributes to the transmission and safeguarding of important cultural, linguistic and historical information. The Centre recognises the right of indigenous communities and individuals to maintain, control, protect and develop their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, and the inherent ownership they have over this intellectual property. The Centre also recognises that communities and individuals within the region hold different views as to what these rights entail. Research conducted by Centre staff and students at the collaborating institutions is subject to approval by the respective institutional human research ethics committees. These statutory committees review and approve research involving Indigenous people with specific reference to Values and Ethics: Guidelines for Ethical Conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research (NHMRC 2003), and AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (AIATSIS 2021), plus the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC, ARC, AVCC 2007) and ask researchers to consider expectations in Keeping Research on Track (NHMRC 2006). However, the CoE acknowledges that simply adhering to institutional requirements does not entail an ethical outcome, and we endorse the NHMRC’s statement that it “is possible for researchers to ‘meet’ rule-based requirements without engaging fully with the implications of difference and values relevant to their research. The approach advanced in these guidelines is more demanding of researchers as it seeks to move from compliance to trust.” (NHMRC 2003: 4)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCarl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present(ANU Press, 2017-09-21)Interned as a prisoner of war in Australia in the 1940s, the Hittite specialist Carl Georg von Brandenstein went on to work with speakers of a number of Australian languages in Western Australia. At a time when the dominant paradigms in linguistics were either Chomskyan reductionism or writing a grammar to the exclusion of textual material, Carl followed his own direction, producing substantial collections of texts and recordings in Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Nyiyaparli, Ngadju and Noongar, as well as information about a number of other Australian languages. Part of his motivation was to obtain examples to reconstruct what he considered to be the original human language that diffused to all corners of the world, so he put some effort into comparing Australian languages with the classical languages he had previously studied.
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ItemBuilding Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)(ISCA, 2018)Machine learning has revolutionized speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of ELPIS, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. ELPIS puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.
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ItemMultilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages(Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
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ItemLD&C possibilities for the next decade(University of Hawaii Press, 2017)
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ItemWorking Together in Vanuatu: Research Histories, Collaborations, Projects and Reflections(ANU Press, 2011-10-01)This collection is derived from a conference held at the Vanuatu National Museum and Cultural Centre (VCC) that brought together a large gathering of foreign and indigenous researchers to discuss diverse perspectives relating to the unique program of social, political and historical research and management that has been fostered in that island nation. While not diminishing the importance of individual or sole-authored methodologies, project-centered collaborative approaches have today become a defining characteristic of Vanuatu’s unique research environment. As this volume attests, this environment has included a dynamically wide range of both ni-Vanuatu and foreign researchers and related research perspectives, most centrally including archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists, historians, legal studies scholars and development practitioners. This emphasis on collaboration has emerged from an ongoing awareness across Vanuatu’s research community of the need for trained researchers to engage directly with pressing social and ethical concerns, and out of the proven fact that it is not just from the outcomes of research that communities or individuals may be empowered, but also through their modes and processes of implementation, as through the ongoing strength and value of the relationships they produce. With this in mind, the papers presented here go beyond the mere celebration of collaboration by demonstrating Vanuatu’s specific environment of cross-cultural research as a diffuse set of historically emergent methodological approaches, and by showing how these work in actual practice.
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ItemKeeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)(University of Hawaii Press, 2012)At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Association of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.
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ItemWalking to Erro: Stories of travel, origins, or affection(Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015)In this chapter I discuss several stories, mostly recorded at Erakor village in Vanuatu, which have as a theme the relationship between the islands of Erromango and Efate in Vanuatu. They reinforce the observation that the water between islands is a pathway rather than an obstruction to communication, recalling the notion of the Pacific as an interconnected ‘Sea of Islands’ in Hau’ofa’s (2008) terms. Together with this perceived connection between these two islands, linguistic features shared between Erromango and South Efate could be an indication of contact sufficient to lead to innovations in South Efate not found in neighbouring languages to the north. Lynch (2000a:337) concludes that the nature of the relationship between South Efate and its neighbours to the south requires further detailed research and this chapter is offered as a step toward understanding the type of contact there was between Erromango and Efate. I will also be concerned to show that the traditional stories on which this chapter is based are still part of Erakor life, in contrast to our expectation from the literature or from the fact that Erakor is the closest village to the capital city of Vanuatu, Port Vila.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDeveloping a Somali Dictionary Application(Macalester College, 2014)New technologies offer access to unprecedented amounts of information and, while the equitable cost of access has been a major problem for distribution of this information, that is now changing. Mobile devices are getting cheaper so more people from a wider range of backgrounds and speaking a wider range of languages are using the internet. Support for the many small languages of the world has become a focus in the academic discipline of linguistics, and this includes developing a presence for these languages on the web and in mobile devices. This article discusses one such example, the Somali-English dictionary app, released in June 2014 by a Melbourne (Australia) team headed by the Somali artist Nadia Faragaab (NF).
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