2 seminars from Steven Bird in january 2019

Wed 9th January at 2pm – room 306 batiment IMAG
Scalable Methods for Working with Unwritten Languages 1: Interactive Respeaking
Mon 14th January at 2pm – room 306 batiment IMAG
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.