Welcome

This is the web page for the Computational Approaches for Documenting and Analyzing Oral Languages Special Session at ICPhS 2019, the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, 5-9 August 2019, Melbourne, Australia.

Summary

The special session Computational Approaches for Documenting and Analyzing Oral Languages welcomes submissions presenting innovative speech data collection methods and/or assistance for linguists and communities of speakers: methods and tools that facilitate collection, transcription and translation of primary language data. Oral languages is understood here as referring to spoken vernacular languages which depend on oral transmission, including endangered languages and (typically low-prestige) regional varieties of major languages.

The special session intends to provide up-to-date information to an audience of phoneticians about developments in machine learning that make it increasingly feasible to automate segmentation, alignment or labelling of audio recordings, even in less-documented languages. A methodological goal is to help establish the field of Computational Language Documentation and contribute to its close association with the phonetic sciences. Computational Language Documentation needs to build on the insights gained through phonetic research; conversely, research in phonetics stands to gain much from the availability of abundant and reliable data on a wider range of languages.

Our special session is mentioned on the ICPhS website here.

Main goals

The special session aims to bring together phoneticians, computer scientists and developers interested in the following goals:

• Rethinking documentary processes: recording, transcription and annotation;
• Responding to the urgent need to document endangered languages and varieties;
• Elaborating an agenda and establishing a roadmap for computational language documentation;
• Ensuring that the requirements of phonetics research are duly taken into consideration in the agenda of Computational Language Documentation;
• Attracting computer scientists to ICPhS and engaging them in discussions with phoneticians (and linguists generally).

Main topics

This special session will focus on documenting and analyzing oral languages, including topics such as the following:

• large-scale phonetics of oral languages,
• automatic phonetic transcription (and phonemic transcription),
• mobile platforms for speech data collection,
• creating multilingual collections of text, speech and images,
• machine learning over these collections,
• open source tools for computational language documentation,
• position papers on computational language documentation.

Session format

Special sessions at ICPhS will normally be 1.5 hours. For our accepted special session, we chose the “workshop” type with a more open format suitable for discussion of methods/tools. The exact format is still to be determined. More details will be provided on the format later.

How does the submission process work?

Papers will be submited directly to the conference by December 4th and will then be evaluated according to the standard ICPhS review process [see here]. Accepted papers will be allocated either to this special session or a general session. When submitting you can specify if you want to be considered for this special session.

Organizers

Laurent Besacier – LIG UGA (France)
Alexis Michaud – LACITO CNRS (France)
Martine Adda-Decker – LPP CNRS (France)
Gilles Adda – LIMSI CNRS (France)
Steven Bird – CDU (Australia)
Graham Neubig – CMU (USA)
François Pellegrino – DDL CNRS (France)
Sakriani Sakti – NAIST (Japan)
Mark Van de Velde – LLACAN CNRS (France)

• • Microphone is used to record speech.
  • Storage is used to select file from phone and store recordings.
  • Phone is used to share files (through Bluetooth connectivity, Wi-Fi or Network).
  • Location is used to point the position of the recordings.

These components must be granted by the user in order the app to be used. They are automatically enabled during the installation process to facilitate its use by an unexperiment user, but it always can be disabled through the app settings (however, it is not recommended since the app will crash and so become unusable).

Here are the improvements made:

• Visual upgrade:
  + Waveform visualizer on the Respeaking and Translation modes (possibility to zoom in/out the audio signal)
  + File explorer included in all modes, to facilitate the navigation between files
  + New Share mode to share recordings between devices (by Bluetooth, Mail, NFC if available)
  + French and German languages available. In addition to English, the application now supports French and German languages. Lig-Aikuma uses by default the language of the phone/tablet.
  + New icons, more consistent to discriminate all type of files (audio, text, image, video)

• Conceptual upgrade:
  + New name for the root project: ligaikuma –> /!\ Henceforth, all data will be stored into this directory instead of “aikuma” (in the previous versions of the app). This change doesn’t have compatibility issues. In the file explorer of the mode, the default position is this root directory. Just go back once with the left grey arrow (on the lower left of the screen) and select the “aikuma” directory to access to your old recordings
  + Generation of a PDF consent form (from informations filled in the metadata form) that can be signed by linguist and speaker thanks to a pdf annotation tool (like Adobe Fill & Sign mobile app)
  + Generation of a CSV file which can be imported in Elan software: it will automatically create segmented tier, as it was done during a respeaking or a translation session. It will also mention by a “non-speech” label that a segment has no speech.
  + Géolocalisation of the recordings
  + Respeak an elicit file: it is now possible to use in Respeaking or Translation mode an audio file initially recorded in Elicitation mode

• Structural upgrade:
  + Undo button on Elicitation to erase/redo the current recording
  + Improvement session backup on Elicitation
  + Non-speech button in Respeaking and Translation modes to indicate by a comment that the segment does not contain speech (but noise or silent for instance)
  + Automatic speaker profile creation to quickly fill in the metadata infos if several sessions with a same speaker

Contributing coders to this version: Guillaume Baudson and Elodie Gauthier
We thank Henry Salfner for the German translation of the app.

Here are the improvements made:

• Visual upgrade:
  + New filename rules (now the format is as follows: YYMMDD-hhmmss_lang_idDevice)
  + Progression bar in all modes
  + Background color and relevant icons on “import file” popup
• Conceptual upgrade:
  + Birth year field (instead of Age year) –> /!\ because of this change, as discussed in a previous BULB meeting, your current recordings made with V1 will not work directly with this new version of the app – Gilles is working on a script to transform V1 metadata into V2 metadata for compatibility
  + No more generation of the _preview file
  + New Elicitation modes for Images and Videos
• Structural upgrade:
  + Undo button on Respeaking/Translate to erase/redo the last respeaking segment
  + Backup of the session for all modes

Contributing coders to this version: Calliste Hanriat, David Blachon and Elodie Gauthier

Contributing coders to this version: David Blachon and Elodie Gauthier