Language documentation is crucial for endangered varieties all over the world. Verb conjugation is a key aspect of this documentation for Romance varieties such as those spoken in central France, in the area of the Linguistic Crescent, which extends overs significant portions of the old provinces of Marche and Bourbonnais. We present a first methodological experiment using automatic speech processing tools for the extraction of verbal paradigms collected and recorded during fieldworks sessions made in situ. In order to prove the feasibility of the approach, we test it with different protocols, on good quality data, and we offer possible ways of extension for this research.
Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we created a gold standard Tamil-English code-switched, sentiment-annotated corpus containing 15,744 comment posts from YouTube. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpus and assigning polarities. We present inter-annotator agreement and show the results of sentiment analysis trained on this corpus as a benchmark.
This paper presents recent progress in the acoustic modelling of under-resourced code-switched (CS) speech in multiple South African languages. We consider two approaches. The first constructs separate bilingual acoustic models corresponding to language pairs (English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho). The second constructs a single unified five-lingual acoustic model representing all the languages (English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho). For these two approaches we consider the effectiveness of semi-supervised training to increase the size of the very sparse acoustic training sets. Using approximately 11 hours of untranscribed speech, we show that both approaches benefit from semi-supervised training. The bilingual TDNN-F acoustic models also benefit from the addition of CNN layers (CNN-TDNN-F), while the five-lingual system does not show any significant improvement. Furthermore, because English is common to all language pairs in our data, it dominates when training a unified language model, leading to improved English ASR performance at the expense of the other languages. Nevertheless, the five-lingual model offers flexibility because it can process more than two languages simultaneously, and is therefore an attractive option as an automatic transcription system in a semi-supervised training pipeline.
We present an ASR based pipeline for Amharic that orchestrates NLP components within a cross media analysis framework (CMAF). One of the major challenges that are inherently associated with CMAFs is effectively addressing multi-lingual issues. As a result, many languages remain under-resourced and fail to leverage out of available media analysis solutions. Although spoken natively by over 22 million people and there is an ever-increasing amount of Amharic multimedia content on the Web, querying them with simple text search is difficult. Searching for, especially audio/video content with simple key words, is even hard as they exist in their raw form. In this study, we introduce a spoken and textual content processing workflow into a CMAF for Amharic. We design an ASR-named entity recognition (NER) pipeline that includes three main components: ASR, a transliterator and NER. We explore various acoustic modeling techniques and develop an OpenNLP-based NER extractor along with a transliterator that interfaces between ASR and NER. The designed ASR-NER pipeline for Amharic promotes the multi-lingual support of CMAFs. Also, the state-of-the art design principles and techniques employed in this study shed light for other less-resourced languages, particularly the Semitic ones.
This paper documents and describes the thirty-one basic language resource packs created for the DARPA LORELEI program for use in development and testing of systems capable of providing language-independent situational awareness in emerging scenarios in a low resource language context. Twenty-four Representative Language Packs cover a broad range of language families and typologies, providing large volumes of monolingual and parallel text, smaller volumes of entity and semantic annotations, and a variety of grammatical resources and tools designed to support research into language universals and cross-language transfer. Seven Incident Language Packs provide test data to evaluate system capabilities on a previously unseen low resource language. We discuss the makeup of Representative and Incident Language Packs, the methods used to produce them, and the evolution of their design and implementation over the course of the multi-year LORELEI program. We conclude with a summary of the final language packs including their low-cost publication in the LDC catalog.
