Endangered Language Documentation: Bootstrapping a Chatino Speech Corpus, Forced Aligner, ASR

Abstract

This project approaches the problem of language documentation and revitalization from a rather untraditional angle. To improve and facilitate language documentation of endangered languages, we attempt to use corpus linguistic methods and speech and language technologies to reduce the time needed for transcription and annotation of audio and video language recordings. The paper demonstrates this approach on the example of the endangered and seriously under-resourced variety of Eastern Chatino (CTP). We show how initial speech corpora can be created that can facilitate the development of speech and language technologies for under-resourced languages by utilizing Forced Alignment tools to time align transcriptions. Time-aligned transcriptions can be used to train speech corpora and utilize automatic speech recognition tools for the transcription and annotation of untranscribed data. Speech technologies can be used to reduce the time and effort necessary for transcription and annotation of large collections of audio and video recordings in digital language archives, addressing the transcription bottleneck problem that most language archives and many under-documented languages are confronted with. This approach can increase the availability of language resources from low-resourced and endangered languages to speech and language technology research and development.

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