Bird, Steven

Chiang, David

Frowein, Friedel

Hanke, Florian

Vaswani, Ashish

ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Vol. 9 (2015), pp. 10–11http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldchttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/24631Documentary Linguistics and ComputationalLinguistics: A response to BrooksSteven BirdUniversity of MelbourneDavid ChiangUniversity of Notre DameFriedel FroweinUniversity of GorokaFlorian HankeUniversity of MelbourneAshish VaswaniUniversity of Southern CaliforniaIn mid-2012 we organized a two-week workshop in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to providetraining in basic techniques and technologies for language documentation, and to gain un-derstanding of how these technologies might be improved in the future. It was a diverseprogram, combining the expertise of scholars from ten institutions. It was also a diverse au-dience, including academics, teachers, students, archivists, translators, pastors, and farmersfrom across the country. Approximately twenty local languages were represented.The central idea of Brooks’ assessment of the workshop is that its computational goalwas incompatible with its documentary goal. However, we would say that there was a sin-gle goal, namely, to document languages of PNG. We would particularly guard against thepossible misperception that data is collected from PNG languages to fuel machine trans-lation in general. While that would admittedly be interesting, machine translation, in thiscontext, is not an end in itself but a means to an end, which is documentation.Much of Brooks’ commentary addresses our reliance on textual sources. We agree withhis reasons, and most were already raised in our article. We had planned to include spokenlanguage recordings among the workshop activities, using 34 voice recorders donated byOlympus, but the recorders turned out to be tied up in student projects. This was one ofseveral logistical challenges of organizing a workshop in PNG, challenges which madethe execution of the workshop turn out differently from its conception. As always, thereare things we would do differently the second time, including a stronger emphasis on orallanguage recording. In fact, it was for this purpose that the Aikuma mobile phone app wasdeveloped (Hanke & Bird 2013, Bird et al 2014a, b). Nevertheless, texts are a form ofLicensed under Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 InternationalE-ISSN 1934-5275Documentary Linguistics and Computational Linguistics 11documentation that some local villagers can readily produce, and several of the workshopparticipants came with exercise books full of hand-written texts.Participants were unanimous that the workshop was a success. They voted with theirfeet, returning each day for intensive language work without expecting compensation. Bothparticipants and presenters came away with experiences and training commensurate withtheir prior knowledge and skills. Those with limited western-style education learned howto gloss and translate a text using an exercise book, and how to elicit the words of a seman-tic domain using the Rapid Words Method. Those with computer skills gained new skillsglossing with FLEx. Those with linguistics training learned about scalable language doc-umentation workflows and new computational methods for supporting them. Those withcomputer science training learned about the different sources of noise that are introducedinto textual data when languages lack an established orthography, and when the boundariesbetween adjacent languages and dialects are poorly understood.While we have argued that computational linguistics and traditional documentary lin-guistics have the same goal with respect to endangered languages, the two fields offerdifferent methodologies. Our inclusion of machine translation methods in language docu-mentation work is not to supplant linguists, but to increase their productivity and to avoidthe need for resources like treebanks and wordnets (Bird & Chiang 2012, Abney & Bird2010). Unfortunately, there are many opportunities for misunderstandings to arise. Butwe maintain that both fields offer proven approaches to the analysis of language data. Theurgency of the documentary challenge compels us to find effective ways to multiply ourefforts.REFERENCESAbney, Steven & Steven Bird. 2010. The Human Language Project: Building a universal cor-pus of the World’s languages. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden. 88–97.Bird, Steven & David Chiang. 2012. Machine translation for language preservation. Pro-ceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Mumbai,India. 125–133.Bird, Steven, Lauren Gawne, Katie Gelbart & Isaac McAlister. 2014a. Collecting bilingualaudio in remote indigenous villages. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference onComputational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland. 1015–1024.Bird, Steven, Florian R. Hanke, Oliver Adams & Haejoong Lee. 2014b. Aikuma: A MobileApp for Collaborative Language Documentation. Workshop on the Use of ComputationalMethods in the Study of Endangered Languages, Baltimore, USA. 1–5.Hanke, Florian & Steven Bird. 2013. Large-scale text collection for unwritten languages.Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing,Nagoya, Japan. 1134–1138.Steven Birdsbird@unimelb.edu.auLANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION & CONSERVATION VOL. 9, 2015

Documentary Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: A response to Brooks

http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/24631/1/bird.pdf

Documentary Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: A response to Brooks

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa