School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDesigning an App for Pregnancy Care for a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community(The Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.
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ItemКрылатые выражения из советских кинофильмов как элементы национальной идентичности(Издательство "Научный консультант", 2019)The paper is dedicated to the questions of the reflection of national identity in the headlines of newspapers Komsomol'skaya Pravda – Moscow, Izvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018, drawing upon examples of winged words adapted from Soviet films. Specific winged phrases considered uniquely reflective of Russian culture are highlighted. An attempt is made to explain the main reasons behind winged phrases transformations. The paper stresses the value of learning winged phrases from Soviet films in practical classes of Russian taught as a foreign language.
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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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ItemNasal aerodynamics and coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance(ASSTA, 2016-12-06)Nasal phonemes are well represented within the lexicon of BininjKunwok.1 Thisstudyexaminesintervocalic,wordmedial nasals and reports patterns of coarticulation using a Smooth- ing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA). This allows for detailed comparisons of peak nasal airflow across six female speakers of the language. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalisation and greater carryover into a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed for coronals when compared to the onset of oral closure in the nasal, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. The velar place of articulation is the exception to this pattern with some limited anticipatory nasalisation. The SSANOVA has shown to be an appropriate technique for quantifying these patterns and dynamic speech data in general.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDeveloping global citizenship through real-world tasks – a virtual exchange between North American university students and Italian upper-secondary school students(Research-publishing.net, 2020-11-30)This paper concerns a virtual exchange project between the University of Virginia (UVa), United States, and an upper-secondary school in Pavia, Italy. Centred on the question of gender equality, the project has been designed to take place over three years (2018–2021) with a direct reference to Robert O’Dowd’s transnational model of virtual exchange for global citizenship education, proposed in 2018. As an integrated part of the language learning curriculum, the project creates a virtual space which parallels the space-time of traditional class tuition, and which students can inhabit with a significant degree of autonomy. More specifically, this paper gives an account of how students, through real-world tasks, could develop global citizenship.
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ItemMultilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages(Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
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ItemThe “other” Spanish: Methodological issues in the study of speech timing in Chilean Spanish(International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2020-01-01)This paper is a preliminary account of speech rhythm and some phonological properties of Chilean Spanish in spontaneous dialogues. Different dialects of Spanish have been studied using rhythm metrics measuring the durational variability of vocalic and consonantal intervals. There are, however, methodological issues regarding the segmentation of intervals, often overlooked in previous research, such as the criteria for categorising certain segments into the different intervals and the segmentation of different voice qualities. The present study addresses this gap and compares rhythm metrics obtained using two methods of segmentation based on the available literature. The analyses reveal that a strictly 'acoustic' approach to segmentation of intervals results in slightly inflated metrics. Nevertheless, both methods show there is significant durational interval variability in Chilean Spanish, compared to other dialects of Spanish, that may be connected to phonological properties of the variety.
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ItemBe Not Like the Wind: Access to Language and Music Records, Next Steps(European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2020)Language archives play an important role in keeping records of the world’s languages safe. Accessible audio recordings held in archives can be used by speakers of small and endangered languages, and their communities, and provide a base for further research and documentation. There is an urgent need for historical analog tape recordings to be located and digitised, as they will soon be unplayable. PARADISEC holds records in 1228 languages. We run training for language documentation and are developing technologies to localise access to language records. A concerted effort is needed to support language archives and sustain language diversity.
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ItemUniMorph 3.0: Universal morphology(European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2020-01-01)The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological paradigms for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline which creates most of our data, so that it is both more complete and more correct. We have added 66 new languages, as well as new parts of speech for 12 languages. We have also amended the schema in several ways. Finally, we present three new community tools: two to validate data for resource creators, and one to make morphological data available from the command line. UniMorph is based at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. This paper details advances made to the schema, tooling, and dissemination of project resources since the UniMorph 2.0 release described at LREC 2018.
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ItemScaling processes of clause chains in Pitjantjatjara(Interspeech, 2020)Clause chains are a syntactic strategy for combining multiple clauses into a single unit. They are reported in many languages, including Korean and Turkish. However, they have seen relatively little focused research. In particular, prosodic features are often mentioned in descriptions of clause chaining, however there have been vanishingly few investigations. Corpus-based studies of the prosody of clause chains in two unrelated languages of Papua New Guinea report that they are typically produced as a sequence of Intonation phrases united by pitch-scaling of the L% boundary tones in each clause with only the final, finite, clause descending to a full L%. The present study is the first experimental investigation of the prosody of clause chains in Pitjantjatjara. This paper focuses on one type of clause chain found in the Australian Indigenous language Pitjantjatjara. We examine a set of 120 clause chains read out by three native Pitjantjatjara speakers. Prosodic analysis reveals that these Pitjantjatjara clause chains are produced within a single Intonational Phrase. Speakers do not pause between the clauses in the chain, there is consistent linear downstep throughout the phrase and additionally phrase final lowering occurs at the end of the utterance. This differs from previous impressionistic studies of the prosody of clause chains.