Automatic Alignment and Analysis of Linguistic Change.

《北美英语地图集》（Atlas of North American English）基于对超过5万人口城市的研究，显示美国地区方言由于元音系统的持续变化而变得越来越不同，导致方言之间存在相当大的误解。 要了解这一过程，需要对更多的社区和发言人进行研究。然而，目前使用的分析方法需要几天或几周的时间才能准确定义单个说话者的元音系统。该项目基于一种加速方法，该方法使用声波和透射的自动对准，在所需时间的百分之一内产生十倍的数据。将开发方法，自动测量每个元音的成绩单中的错误率等于或低于手动测量。这些技术将在一个非常大的数据库上进行测试，该数据库是1973年至2008年在费城社区每年记录的一系列访谈。方言多样性是限制自动语音识别成功的主要因素之一，并为我们理解语言变化的原因提供了一个重大挑战。该项目开发的方法将有助于加速其他社区和其他语言的社会语言学分析。费城数据库的分析结果将有助于理解性别差异的语言变化的进展，变化的方向逆转，并在社区之间的变化扩散。

The Atlas of North American English, based on the study of cities over 50,000 population, shows that American regional dialects are becoming increasingly different as a result of ongoing changes in their vowel systems, leading to considerable miscomprehension across dialects. An understanding of this process calls for studies of many more communities and speakers. However, currently used methods of analysis require several days or weeks to accurately define the vowel system of a single speaker. This project is based on an accelerated method that produces ten times as much data in one hundredth of the time required, using automatic alignment of the sound wave and transcriptions. Methods will be developed for automatically measuring each vowel in the transcript with an error rate equal to or lower than that of manual measurement. These techniques will be tested on a very large database on change in the speech of a metropolitan community, a series of interviews recorded annually in Philadelphia neighborhoods from 1973 to 2008.Dialect diversity is one of the major factors limiting the success of automatic speech recognition and provides a major challenge for our understanding of the causes of language change. The methods developed in this project will serve to accelerate sociolinguistic analysis across other communities and other languages. Findings from the analysis of the Philadelphia database will contribute to the understanding of gender differentiation in language change in progress, the reversal of the direction of change, and the diffusion of change across neighborhoods.