Integrating Automatic Transcription into the Language Documentation Workflow: Experiments with Na Data and the Persephone Toolkit

Automatic speech recognition tools have potential for facilitating language documentation, but in practice these tools remain little-used by linguists for a variety of reasons, such as that the technology is still new (and evolving rapidly), user-friendly interfaces are still under development, and case studies demonstrating the practical usefulness of automatic recognition in a low-resource setting remain few. This article reports on a success story in integrating automatic transcription into the language documentation workflow, specifically for Yongning Na, a language of Southwest China. Using Persephone, an open-source toolkit, a single-speaker speech transcription tool was trained over five hours of manually transcribed speech. The experiments found that this method can achieve a remarkably low error rate (on the order of 17%), and that automatic transcriptions were useful as a canvas for the linguist. The present report is intended for linguists with little or no knowledge of speech processing. It aims to provide insights into (i) the way the tool operates and (ii) the process of collaborating with natural language processing specialists. Practical recommendations are offered on how to anticipate the requirements of this type of technology from the early stages of data collection in the field.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The major genetic determinants of HIV-1 control affect HLA class I peptide presentation.

Infectious and inflammatory diseases have repeatedly shown strong genetic associations within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC); however, the basis for these associations remains elusive. To define host genetic effects on the outcome of a chronic viral infection, we performed genome-wide association analysis in a multiethnic cohort of HIV-1 controllers and progressors, and we analyzed the effects of individual amino acids within the classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA) proteins. We identified >300 genome-wide significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the MHC and none elsewhere. Specific amino acids in the HLA-B peptide binding groove, as well as an independent HLA-C effect, explain the SNP associations and reconcile both protective and risk HLA alleles. These results implicate the nature of the HLA-viral peptide interaction as the major factor modulating durable control of HIV infection

Moinhos de vento e varas de queixadas: o perspectivismo e a economia do pensamento

O artigo passa em revista uma série de confrontos entre o que poderíamos chamar de percepções "perspectivistas" e "naturalistas" do mundo: o processo de cristianização do ocidente medieval, o declínio da magia européia, o apogeu e crise da caça às bruxas no início da Idade Moderna e o argumento de um clássico, o Dom Quixote de Miguel de Cervantes. Trata-se, em cada caso, de motivos característicos da grande narrativa do triunfo da razão e do contraste entre o pensamento racional e seus contrários que, examinados em detalhe, mostram porém a coexistência de pensamentos, o caráter imediato e reversível de suas transformações. A noção de perspectivismo permite assim agilizar a descrição histórica das reformas epistemológicas e dessubstancializar as noções antropológicas de "racional" e "não-racional". No final do texto são sugeridas algumas vias de estudo sobre o encontro entre os xamanismos ameríndios (o universo do qual é tomada a noção de perspectivismo tal como aparece no artigo) e suas reelaborações recentes.<br>The article reviews a series of confrontations between what we could dub 'perspectivist' and 'naturalist' perceptions of the world: the process of Christianization of the medieval west, the decline of European sorcery, the apogee and crisis of witch-hunting at the dawn of the Modern Age and the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' Dom Quixote. Each case deals with themes characteristic of the grand narrative of the triumph of reason and the contrast between rational thinking and its opposites which, when examined in detail, actually reveal the co-existence of modes of thinking, as well as the immediate and reversible character of their transformations. The notion of perspectivism thus enables a more nuanced and versatile historical description of these epistemic reforms and the de-substantialization of anthropological notions of the rational and the irrational. The text concludes by suggesting some ways to study the encounter between Amerindian shamanisms (the universe from which the notion of perspectivism as it appears in the article is taken) and their recent re-elaborations