Transcription

Transcription, the written representation of spoken human language, is vital to any language documentation and revitalization project. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to a variety of different transcription methodologies for various purposes. The workshop primarily focuses two types of transcription: (i) phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet and (ii) discourse transcription where elements of well-known transcription systems are introduced (Conversation Analysis – developed at UC Santa Barbara). The workshop emphasizes the nuts and bolts of these transcription systems and how to apply transcription practices to documentation and revitalization projects.2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language Research – ALASKA Alaska Native Language Cente

Statistical parametric speech synthesis for Ibibio

Ibibio is a Nigerian tone language, spoken in the south-east coastal region of Nigeria. Like most African languages, it is resource-limited. This presents a major challenge to conventional approaches to speech synthesis, which typically require the training of numerous predictive models of linguistic features such as the phoneme sequence (i.e., a pronunciation dictionary plus a letter-to-sound model) and prosodic structure (e.g., a phrase break predictor). This training is invariably supervised, requiring a corpus of training data labelled with the linguistic feature to be predicted. In this paper, we investigate what can be achieved in the absence of many of these expensive resources, and also with a limited amount of speech recordings. We employ a statistical parametric method, because this has been found to offer good performance even on small corpora, and because it is able to directly learn the relationship between acoustics and whatever linguistic features are available, potentially mitigating the absence of explicit representations of intermediate linguistic layers such as prosody. We present an evaluation that compares systems that have access to varying degrees of linguistic structure. The simplest system only uses phonetic context (quinphones), and this is compared to systems with access to a richer set of context features, with or without tone marking. It is found that the use of tone marking contributes significantly to the quality of synthetic speech. Future work should therefore address the problem of tone assignment using a dictionary and the building of a prediction module for out-of-vocabulary words. Key words: speech synthesis, Ibibio, low-resource languages, HT

Collaborative Collecting Mission between NARI (National Agricultural Research Institute, Papua New Guinea) and NIAS in Western and Gulf Provinces, Papua New Guinea 3^<rd>-21^<st> July 2006

Here we report on the third joint NARI-NIAS collecting mission for crop and wild relatives of crops genetic resources. This mission covered parts of Western and Gulf Provinces. The genetic resources collected included five species of Vigna , three species of Oryza , cassava, taro, sago, aibika and banana (Musa acuminata). The areas visited represented distinctly different ecologies and in each area a different assemblage of species was found. Only in the coastal villages of Mabaduan and Masingara were the species O. officinalis and Vigna cf. minima found. In Balimo the orange soil suggests the presence of iron resulting in lake water with low pH. In that area O. rufipogon is abundant. In the Kikori area Oryza species were not found but Vigna species were present. In the coastal village of Mabaduan cassava was collected. In Balimo and Kikori delta, sago was collected. The germplasm represents new collecting locations for several species. The diverse ecologies in which germplasm was collected suggest that they are likely to have useful adaptive traits.1．手続き等の経緯 本調査は生物研とパプアニューギニア国（PNG）の農業研究所（NARI）との間に2003年に取り交わされた3年計画の植物遺伝資源共同探索調査のMOUに基づくものである．その最終年度にあたる今年度の探索調査に先立ち，半年前よりNARIとの事前準備を進めてきた．4月初めにはNARIを通じてPNGの環境保全省宛に共同調査実施の許可申請を行ったが，先方の手続きが進まず当初予定していた時期に間に合うように回答を得ることができなかった．そのため計画を延期し，この間に環境保全省への許可申請ならびにこれに基づくPNG外務省からの研究ビザ発給に至った．これらの諸手続のため出発を2週間延期するに至ったが，計画した探索調査の遂行には支障を及ぼすことはなかった．PNG での活動は生物研およびNARI担当者による調査隊が遂行し，各訪問地で現地の農業省スタッフが参加する形をとった．現地における探索調査終了後，収集品のPNGにおける検疫手続きを踏み，全ての収集遺伝資源および植物標本はNARIと生物研で二分した．帰国時に成田空港で植物防疫法に基づく検査を受け，収集品および標本を持ち帰った． 2．現地における具体的活動 3年間の大きな課題目標はPNGにおけるNARIおよび生物研による植物遺伝資源の探索・収集である．特に低地におけるOryza属，Vigna 属，サゴヤシおよびその他のイモ類に焦点を置いた．今年度の調査は3年計画の最終年にあたる．今回の調査は前回までの2年間の東部および北部の探索調査を踏まえたうえで、PNGのなかでもアクセスが非常に困難であるPNG南西部，特に海岸部や河川のデルタ地帯に広がる沼地・湿地帯および高温多湿の熱帯雨林が広がるWestern州およびGulf州において探索を行った．Western州ではまずDaruを起点にMabaduan～Masingaraを陸地の集落部は徒歩で，海岸部・川沿いおよび湿地帯（swamp）はボートで探索した．次に同じWestern州のBalimoに移動しFly川流域の広大なswamp地帯をボートで探索した．また、Gulf州Kikori周辺では河川流域をボートで，熱帯雨林地帯を車および徒歩で探索した．その結果，Oryza属野生種3種17系統，Vigna属野生種3種11系統を収集することができた．特にOryza属の多様性に富むと予想されたWestern州で，MabaduanからPahoturi川を上ったKulalai村周辺においてわずか数百mの範囲内にOryza rufipogon，O. officinalisおよびO.longiglumis のゲノム構成の異なる3種の野生稲が観察されたことは特筆すべきことであった．一方，今回訪問したWesternおよびGulf州の住民はデンプン源としてサゴ・バナナ・タロイモ等を主食としており，それぞれの地域の各集落が独自の品種・系統を維持しているようである．今回はサゴヤシ6系統，キャッサバ11系統，野生タロイモ3系統および野生バナナ1系統を収集し，NARIとしても大きな成果が得られた．以上，今回のPNG における現地活動では滞りなく課題目標をこなすことができた．多大なる協力支援・便宜供与をいただいたPNG関係各位に御礼申し上げる

African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe

Language endangerment and language documentation in Africa

Non peer reviewe

Foaming in distillation and absorption columns

Imperial Users onl