From `Snippet-lects' to Doculects and Dialects: Leveraging Neural Representations of Speech for Placing Audio Signals in a Language Landscape

XLSR-53 a multilingual model of speech, builds a vector representation from audio, which allows for a range of computational treatments. The experiments reported here use this neural representation to estimate the degree of closeness between audio files, ultimately aiming to extract relevant linguistic properties. We use max-pooling to aggregate the neural representations from a "snippet-lect" (the speech in a 5-second audio snippet) to a "doculect" (the speech in a given resource), then to dialects and languages. We use data from corpora of 11 dialects belonging to 5 less-studied languages. Similarity measurements between the 11 corpora bring out greatest closeness between those that are known to be dialects of the same language. The findings suggest that (i) dialect/language can emerge among the various parameters characterizing audio files and (ii) estimates of overall phonetic/phonological closeness can be obtained for a little-resourced or fully unknown language. The findings help shed light on the type of information captured by neural representations of speech and how it can be extracted from these representation

A viewing and processing tool for the analysis of a comparable corpus of Kiranti mythology

International audienceThis presentation describes a trilingual corpus of three endangered languages of the Kiranti group (Tibeto-Burman family) from Eastern Nepal. The languages, which are exclusively oral, share a rich mythology, and it is thus possible to build a corpus of the same native narrative material in the three languages. The segments of similar semantic content are tagged with a "similarity" label to identify correspondences among the three language versions of the story. An interface has been developed to allow these similarities to be viewed together, in order to allow make possible comparison of the different lexical and morphosyntactic features of each language. A concordancer makes it possible to see the various occurrences of words or glosses, and to further compare and contrast the languages

Cocoon une plateforme pour la conservation et la diffusion de ressources orales en sciences humaines et sociales

International audienc

A simple architecture for the fine-grained documentation of endangered languages: the LACITO multimedia archive

A paraître dans : Proceedings of Oriental-COCOSDA 2011. Présenté à : 2011 International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments (Oriental COCOSDA 2011), 2011-10-26 -> 2011-10-28, TaiwanInternational audienceThe LACITO multimedia archive provides free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in "rare" or endangered languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. Its goal is to contribute to the documentation and study of a precious human heritage: the world's languages. It has a special strength in languages of Asia and the Pacific. The LACITO archive was built with little personnel and less funding. It has been devised, developed and maintained over two decades by two researchers assisted by one engineer. Its simple architecture is based on current standards: Unicode character coding and XML markup; and Dublin Core/Open Language Archives Community recommendations for metadata. The data can be consulted online with any standard browser. The technical simplicity of the tools developed at LACITO makes them suitable for the creation of similar databases at other institutions. (For instance, tools from this archive were successfully adapted in the creation of the Formosan Languages archive.

Phonetic lessons from automatic phonemic transcription: preliminary reflections on Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Tsuut’ina (Dene) data

International audienceAutomatic phonemic transcription tools now reach high levels of accuracy on a single speaker with relatively small amounts of training data: on the order of 100 to 250 minutes of transcribed speech. Beyond its practical usefulness for language documentation, use of automatic transcription also yields some insights for phoneticians. The present report illustrates this by going into qualitative error analysis on two test cases, Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Tsuut’ina (Dene). Among other benefits, error analysis allows for a renewed exploration of phonetic detail: examining the output of phonemic transcription software compared with spectrographic and aural evidence. From a methodological point of view, the present report is intended as a case study in Computational Language Documentation: an interdisciplinary approach that associates fieldworkers (“diversity linguists”) and computer scientists with phoneticians/phonologists

Mechanical behaviors of agglomerated ceramic powders for cold spraying applications

Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Contribuer au progrès solidaire des recherches et de la documentation : la Collection Pangloss et la Collection AuCo

International audienceThis talk sets out the scientific goals and achievements of two collections hosted by the Cocoon Open Archive of oral resources: the Pangloss Collection, which mainly focuses on unwritten languages from all areas in the world ; and the AuCo Collection, which is dedicated to languages of Vietnam and neighbouring countries. The aim is to contribute to joint progress in language documentation and in research. Emphasis is placed on the perspectives for phonetic/phonological research that are opened by some recent achievements in the framework of these two Collections.La présente communication présente les projets scientifiques et les réalisations de deux collections hébergées par la plateforme de ressources orales Cocoon : la Collection Pangloss, qui concerne principalement des langues de tradition orale (sans écriture), du monde entier ; et la Collection AuCo, dédiée aux langues du Vietnam et de pays voisins. L'objectif est un progrès solidaire des recherches et de la documentation linguistique. L'accent est mis sur les perspectives ouvertes pour la recherche en phonétique/phonologie par certaines réalisations récentes dans le cadre de ces deux Collections

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

Impact of sown fallows on the Xiphinema index populations in different soil types

The nematode Xiphinema index is, economically, the major virus vector in viticulture, transmitting specifically the Grapevine Fanleaf Virus (GFLV), the most severe grapevine virus disease worldwide. The management of this disease has long been to use soil fumigation, harmful for both the applicator and the environment. The objective of this study was to evaluate an alternative approach using plants to reduce vector nematode populations between uprooting and replanting. Of thirty botanical species, tested in previous greenhouse trials, the seven best performing plants were evaluated for their capacity to reduce X. index populations in soil compared to bare soil in 5 field trials on different soil types in Bordeaux and Burgundy. In most trials, sown fallows reduced the number of X. index nematodes more efficiently than bare soil. All plants tested in field, except Trifolium pratense, showed their efficacy in field on survival of nematodes X. index but this efficiency varied according to species and site. The best results were obtained with Medicago hybride, Tagetes minuta, Avena sativa and Vicia villosa. Over the following years we will be evaluating if a decrease of the populations of the nematode vector does lead to a significant drop or delay of GFLV contamination for the newly planted vines

Documenting and Researching Endangered Languages: The Pangloss Collection

The Pangloss Collection is a language archive developed since 1994 at the Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO) research group of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). It contributes to the documentation and study of the world’s languages by providing free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in endangered or under-resourced languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. The Collection is an Open Archive containing media files (recordings), text annotations, and metadata; it currently contains over 1,400 recordings in 70 languages, including more than 400 transcribed and annotated documents. The annotations consist of transcription, free translation in English, French and/or other languages, and, in many cases, word or morpheme glosses; they are time-aligned with the recordings, usually at the utterance level. A web interface makes these annotations accessible online in an interlinear display format, in synchrony with the sound, using any standard browser. The structure of the XML documents makes them accessible to searching and indexing, always preserving the links to the recordings. Long-term preservation is guaranteed through a partnership with a digital archive. A guiding principle of the Pangloss Collection is that a close association between documentation and research is highly profitable to both. This article presents the collections currently available; it also aims to convey a sense of the range of possibilities they offer to the scientific and speaker communities and to the general public.National Foreign Language Resource Cente