School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemDigital curation and access to recordings of traditional cultural performance.(UNESCO, 2021)Being home to over a quarter of the world’s languages, the Pacific is a particularly good place to focus on how language records can be made accessible. The creation and description of research records has not always been a priority for humanities academics and any records that are created have typically not been provided with good archival solutions. This is despite these records often being of cultural or historical relevance beyond academia. Many cultural agencies struggle to keep track of recordings they have made, and it is the same for many researchers. Often it is only when researchers prepare recordings for archiving that they realize how many (or few) are described adequately, or have been transcribed or translated.
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ItemThe Pacific Expansion: Optimizing phonetic transcription of archival corpora(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableBreathing digital life into Oceanic language corpora(OpenEdition, 2021-01-01)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Language Documentation Quartet(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.