EAGER: Construction of Inter-Igbo

EAGER：Inter-Igbo 的建设

• 批准号: 1240178
• 负责人: Eugene Charniak
• 金额: $ 8.3万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-07-01 至 2014-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1240178&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Construction; Inter; Igbo

Igbo is a language spoken by twenty million people, mostly in southern Nigeria. This EAGER project makes use of a corpus of spoken Igbo, which will cover all of the dialects of the language. The corpus is to be used for explorations in which statistical machine learning (ML) programs are created to learn an "inter-Igbo'' consisting cognate sets (Igbo words pronounced differently in different locations but having the same meaning) that enable the corpus to be treated as if it were spoken as a single language, even though the dialects are, at extreme ends of the Igbo homeland, mutually unintelligible. Another aspect of our work is the extension of the existing corpus to fill in gaps in dialect coverage where there currently are recordings from locations that have no near geographical neighbors. The need for this stems from the fact that the closer a dialect's neighbors the more similar they are, and the easier for programs to locate words which differ systematically.Achieving goals of this exploratory project is of considerable interest for computational linguistics. As opposed to language change over time, there is little computational work on language change over geography, and finding the appropriate ML models for the latter aspect of language variation is a considerable challenge.

伊博语是一种有两千万人使用的语言，大部分在尼日利亚南部。 这个EAGER项目利用了一个伊博语口语语料库，它将涵盖伊博语的所有方言。 该语料库将用于探索，其中创建统计机器学习（ML）程序来学习由同源集合组成的“伊格博语间”（伊格博语单词在不同地点发音不同，但具有相同的含义），这使得该语料库能够被视为就像它一样被视为一种语言，尽管在伊格博家园的极端，方言相互难以理解。 我们工作的另一个方面是扩展现有的语料库，以填补方言覆盖范围的空白，目前有来自没有邻近地理邻居的地点的录音。 这种需要源于这样一个事实，即方言的邻居越接近，它们就越相似，程序就越容易定位系统不同的单词。实现这个探索性项目的目标对计算语言学来说是相当有意义的。 与语言随时间的变化相反，语言随地理变化的计算工作很少，为语言变化的后一方面找到合适的ML模型是一个相当大的挑战。