Scalable Methods for Working with Unwritten Languages 1: Interactive Respeaking

Scalable Methods for Working with Unwritten Languages 2: Talking about Places and Processes

Steven Bird, Charles Darwin University

Computational methods offer exciting new possibilities for recording and processing low resource languages. If we are to extend these methods to encompass all languages we run into a problem: most languages are unwritten. Existing attempts encounter the “transcription bottleneck”, the fact that it is extremely onerous to transcribe audio in a language that has no established orthography. These talks describe two new ways to address the transcription bottleneck, by rethinking the tasks and the end products in the light of the capacities and motives of speakers, and the requirements of the speech and language processing pipeline. These talks will describe work in progress, based in a remote indigenous community in Australia.