Ireland

Language technologies, particularly speech technologies, are becoming more pervasive for access to digital platforms and resources. This brings to the forefront concerns of their inclusivity, first in terms of language diversity. Additionally, research shows speech recognition to be more accurate for men than for women and more accurate for individuals younger than 30 years of age than those older. 
In the Global South where languages are low resource, these same issues should be taken into consideration in data collection efforts to not replicate these mistakes. 
It is also important to note that in varying contexts within the Global South, this work presents additional nuance and potential for bias based on accents, related dialects and variants of a language.
This paper documents: 
i) the designing and execution of a Linguists Engagement for purposes of building an inclusive Kiswahili Speech Recognition dataset, representative of the diversity among speakers of the language
ii) the unexpected yet key learning in terms of socio-linguistcs which demonstrate the importance of multi-disciplinarity in teams developing datasets and NLP technologies
iii) the creation of a test dataset intended to be used for evaluating the performance of Speech Recognition models on demographic groups that are likely to be underrepresented.

ACL 2022

Corpus Development of Kiswahili Speech Recognition Test and Evaluation sets, Preemptively Mitigating Demographic Bias Through Collaboration with Linguists

historical change

language variants

language dialect

corpus development

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

workshop paper

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Many archival recordings of speech from endangered languages remain unannotated and inaccessible to community members and language learning programs. One bottleneck is the time-intensive nature of annotation. An even narrower bottleneck occurs for recordings with access constraints, such as language that must be vetted or filtered by authorised community members before annotation can begin. We propose a privacy-preserving workflow to widen both bottlenecks for recordings where speech in the endangered language is intermixed with a more widely-used language such as English for meta-linguistic commentary and questions (e.g. What is the word for 'tree'?). We integrate voice activity detection (VAD), spoken language identification (SLI), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the metalinguistic content, which an authorised person can quickly scan to triage recordings that can be annotated by people with lower levels of access. We report work-in-progress processing 136 hours archival audio containing a mix of English and Muruwari. Our collaborative work with the Muruwari custodian of the archival materials show that this workflow reduces metalanguage transcription time by 20% even given only minimal amounts of annotated training data: 10 utterances per language for SLI and for ASR at most 39 minutes, and possibly as little as 39 seconds.

Automated speech tools for helping communities process restricted-access corpora for language revival efforts

This paper describes the motivation and implementation details for a rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme engine Gᵢ2Pᵢ implemented in pure Python and released under the open source MIT license. The engine and interface have been designed to prioritize the developer experience of potential contributors without requiring a high level of programming knowledge. Gᵢ2Pᵢ already provides mappings for 30 (mostly Indigenous) languages, and the package is accompanied by a web-based interactive development environment, a RESTful API, and extensive documentation to encourage the addition of more mappings in the future. We also present three downstream applications of Gᵢ2Pᵢ and show results of a preliminary evaluation.

Gi2Pi Rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme transformations

we present an approach to efficiently recover texts from corrupted documents of endangered languages. Textual resources for such languages are scarce, and sometimes the few available resources are corrupted PDF documents

Recovering Text from Endangered Languages Corrupted PDF documents

For decades, researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics have been developing models and algorithms that aim to serve the needs of language documentation projects. However, these models have seen little use in language documentation despite their great potential for making documentary linguistic artefacts better and easier to produce. In this work, we argue that a major reason for this NLP gap is the lack of a strong foundation of application software which can on the one hand serve the complex needs of language documentation and on the other hand provide effortless integration with NLP models. We further present and describe a work-in-progress system we have developed to serve this need, Glam.


Closing the NLP Gap Documentary Linguistics and NLP Need a Shared Software Infrastructure

Machine translation for low-resource languages, such as Guarani, is a challenging task due to the lack of data. One way of tackling it is using pretrained word embeddings for model initialization. In this work we try to check if currently available data is enough to train rich embeddings for enhancing MT for Guarani and Spanish, by building a set of word embedding collections and training MT systems using them. We found that the trained vectors are strong enough to slightly improve the performance of some of the translation models and also to speed up the training convergence.

Can We Use Word Embeddings for Enhancing Guarani-Spanish Machine Translation?

we present a game with a purpose (GWAP) (Von Ahn, 2006). The aim of the game is to promote language learning and 'noticing' (Skehan, 2013). The game has been designed for Irish, but the framework could be used for other languages. Irish is a minority language which means that L2 learners have limited opportunities for exposure to the language, and additionally, there are also limited (digital) learning resources available. This research incorporates game development, language pedagogy and ICALL language materials development. This paper will focus on the language materials development as this is a bottleneck in the teaching and learning of minority and endangered languages.

Faoi Gheasa an adaptive game for Irish language learning

There are many challenges in morphological fieldwork annotation: it heavily relies on segmentation and feature labeling (which have both practical and theoretical drawbacks), it’s time-intensive, and the annotator needs to be linguistically trained and may still annotate things inconsistently. We propose a workflow that relies on unsupervised and active learning grounded in Word-and-Paradigm morphology
(WP). Machine learning has the potential to greatly accelerate the annotation process and allow a human annotator to focus on problematic cases, while the WP approach makes for an annotation system that is word-based and relational, removing the need to make decisions about feature labeling and segmentation early
in the process and allowing speakers of the language of interest to participate more actively, since linguistic training is not necessary. We present a proof-of-concept for the first step of the workflow: in a realistic fieldwork setting, annotators can process hundreds of forms per hour.

A Word-and-Paradigm Workflow for Fieldwork Annotation

This is a report on results obtained in the development of speech recognition tools intended to support linguistic documentation efforts. The test case is an extensive fieldwork corpus of Japhug, an endangered language of the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. The goal is to reduce the transcription workload of field linguists. The method used is a deep learning approach based on the language-specific tuning of a generic pre-trained representation model, XLS-R, using a Transformer architecture. We note difficulties in implementation, in terms of learning stability. But this approach brings significant improvements nonetheless. The quality of phonemic transcription is improved over earlier experiments; and most significantly, the new approach allows for reaching the stage of automatic word recognition. Subjective evaluation of the tool by the author of the training data confirms the usefulness of this approach.

Fine-tuning pre-trained models for Automatic Speech Recognition, experiments on a fieldwork corpus of Japhug (Trans-Himalayan family)

In Philotis (https://philotis.athenarc.gr/) we aim at supporting the researchers of living languages to develop annotated (linked) spoken and textual resources without external technical aid: ideally, speakers of the documented language and eager linguists alone would suffice. To this end, we take advantage of open-source NLP tools, semantic web technologies, annotation tools and universally adopted annotation and codification schemes. Pomak is our case study of endangered oral language. We make available existing and new textual and oral material of Pomak and develop annotated spoken and textual corpora. Here, we provide some information about Pomaks and their language and, briefly present our experience from the development of a Latin-based orthography and a morphologically annotated corpus of Pomak.

Morphologically annotated corpora of Pomak

This study investigates applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques to Hupa, a critically endangered Native American language from the Dene (Athabaskan) language family. Using around 9h12m of spoken data produced by one elder who is a first-language Hupa speaker, we experimented with different evaluation schemes and training settings. On average a fully connected deep neural network reached a word error rate of 35.26%. Our overall results illustrate the utility of ASR for making Hupa language documentation more accessible and usable. In addition, we found that when training acoustic models, using recordings with transcripts that were not carefully verified did not necessarily have a negative effect on model performance. This shows promise for speech corpora of indigenous languages that commonly include transcriptions produced by second-language speakers or linguists who have advanced knowledge in the language of interest.

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Next from ACL 2022

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NUS-IDS at CASE 2021 Task 1: Improving Multilingual Event Sentence Coreference Identification with Linguistic Information

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