Integrating, Disseminating, and Archiving Components of the Shoshoni Language Project

Shoshoni 语言项目的整合、传播和归档组件

• 批准号: 1911603
• 负责人: Marianna Di Paolo
• 金额: $ 19.74万
• 依托单位: University of Utah
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-08-15 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1911603&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Integrating; Disseminating; Archiving; Components; Shoshoni

The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, recognizes the unique status and value of Native American languages. Shoshoni [ISO 639-3 shh] is the northernmost member of the Uto-Aztecan language family, languages spoken from Wyoming to Central America. The Shoshoni language today continues to be an important component of Goshute and Shoshone tribal identity. In the 1960's-1970's, the late Wick R. Miller, of the University of Utah, taperecorded speakers of Shoshoni (born from ~1875-1920) from several different varieties, representing the most extensive documentary corpus of any Great Basin language, of vital cultural, historical, and linguistic importance to several tribal communities in the Western states. Past linguistic studies of Shoshoni have largely focused on the internal structure of sentences in isolation and on the structure of words, while this project will focus on its sound system and discourse-level structure. Broader impacts include the availability of the two corpora as free online resources from the Marriott Library (University of Utah) and the California Language Archive (UC-Berkeley). The project will also provide undergraduates from Shoshoni-speaking tribal communities with valuable experience on a computational linguistic research project, and enhance interactions between these young people and the two native-speaker elders collaborating on the project. The team will also produce a print version and an easy-to-read electronic version of a subset of the traditional stories from the Wick R. Miller Collection and disseminate them to the three communities collaborating on the project, the South Fork Band Council of the Te-Moak Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation and the Ely Shoshone Tribe.While Shoshoni is fairly well-documented for a Native American language, its discourse structure and its phonetics and phonology are relatively understudied. Thus, these significant gaps will be remedied by the development of two corpora. First, the 36 stories will be marked up to produce a electronically-searchable database valuable for sentence-level as well as discourse-level linguistic studies. Second, a phonological and phonetically valuable corpus, consisting of audio-TextGrid pairs of word and sentence-sized recordings which will be force aligned and fine-tuned. In the resulting corpus, the phonemes representing each vowel and consonant will be aligned with the corresponding part of the sound file, allowing researchers to automate the acoustic phonetic analysis of each sound. Such text-to-audio aligned corpora already exist for majority languages such as English, German, Japanese, and Spanish, making their sound systems relatively easy to study and thus leading to the development of electronic products that can quickly process spoken language. These majority language corpora are prepared using costly, language-specific computational tools called forced aligners. Our project will train the Montreal Forced Aligner to align the text of 4,000-5,000 Shoshoni words and short sentences to sound. Doing so will provide a model of how to inexpensively use a generic forced aligner to align text-to-audio data for any small, understudied language. The resulting forced-aligned Shoshoni corpus will greatly speed up the acoustic analysis of this phonologically complex language and lead to many relatively inexpensive, but in-depth, scientifically-sound research studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

美国国会于1990年通过的《美国原住民语言法》认识到美国原住民语言的独特地位和价值。 Shoshoni [ISO 639-3 SHH]是Uto-Aztecan语言家族的最北端成员，该语言是从怀俄明州到中美洲的语言。当今的肖肖尼语仍然是Goshute和Shoshone部落身份的重要组成部分。在1960年代 - 1970年代，犹他大学的已故威克·R·米勒（Wick R. Miller）的肖肖尼（Shoshoni）的演讲者（从1875年至1920年出生），来自几种不同的品种，代表了任何大流域，最广泛的纪录片，具有重要的文化，历史，历史，历史，以及西方西方国家的几个文化重要性。过去对Shoshoni的语言研究主要集中在孤立和单词结构上的句子的内部结构上，而该项目将集中在其声音系统和话语级别的结构上。更广泛的影响包括从万豪图书馆（犹他大学）和加利福尼亚语言档案馆（UC-Berkeley）（UC-Berkeley）的两个免费在线资源的可用性。 该项目还将在讲肖肖尼的部落社区的本科生中为计算语言研究项目提供宝贵的经验，并增强这些年轻人与在该项目中合作的两个母语扬声器长者之间的互动。该团队还将制作一个印刷版本和一个易于阅读的传统故事子集的电子版本，从威克·R·米勒（Wick R. Miller语音学相对不足。因此，这些重大差距将通过开发两个语料库来解决。 首先，将对36个故事进行标记，以产生一个可用于句子级别和话语级语言研究的可电子搜索数据库。其次，语音和语音上有价值的语料库，由单词和句子大小的录音组成，它们将被强制对齐和微调。在结果的语料库中，代表每个元音和辅音的音素将与声音文件的相应部分一致，从而使研究人员可以自动化每个声音的声音语音分析。 这样的文本对审计语料库已经存在于英语，德语，日语和西班牙语等多数语言中，使他们的音响系统相对易于学习，从而导致了可以快速处理口语的电子产品的开发。 这些多数语言语料库是使用称为强制对准器的昂贵的，特定于语言的计算工具制备的。 我们的项目将训练蒙特利尔强迫对齐者，以使4,000-5,000个shoshoni单词和简短句子的文字对齐。这样做将提供一个模型，即如何廉价地使用通用强制对准器来对齐任何小小的研究的语言。 由此产生的强制对齐的Shoshoni语料库将极大地加快对语音复杂语言的声学分析，并导致许多相对便宜但深入的，科学的研究研究。这项奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过该基金会的知识分子优点和广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得的支持。