Enhancing Data and Tools for Research and Education on African American English

没有哪种美式英语比非裔美国人说的英语更受研究人员、媒体或公众的关注。非洲裔美国人英语和非裔美国儿童在美国社会格局中的地位往往是争议的来源，引发了关于教育政策和实践中的公平以及住房歧视中的语言侧写等话题的广泛辩论。美国英语的研究人员长期以来也一直在争论非洲裔美国人英语的历史起源，以及非洲裔美国人所说的语言变体与他们的欧洲裔美国人邻居所说的语言变体之间的持续关系。长期以来，研究已经证明了白话非裔美国人英语和其他非标准语言变体的系统性和规律性，但关于非洲裔美国人英语变体的起源、当前和未来的发展以及它们与地区性欧洲裔美国人和其他社会种族变体的关系仍存在重要问题。与此同时，加强知识在社会和教育方面的重要应用仍然存在于非标准变体的性质以及与非标准变体相关的社会教育意义上，尤其是非裔美国人英语。发展对非裔美国人英语的更好知识的主要障碍之一是缺乏关于这种变体的公开数据和详细信息。除了他们为自己的目的私下收集的数据外，学者和教育工作者可以获得的研究数据非常少。该奖项支持创建第一个非洲裔美国人英语公共语料库。通过该奖项，研究人员正在建立一个庞大的语言注释口语数据集合，以及面向公众的基于网络的资源。这些资源将使广泛的研究人员以及公众更有力地了解这种多样性。这样的语料库对于开发语音到文本软件等语言技术也很重要，并导致更好的人机交互。

No variety of U.S. English has received more attention by researchers, the media, or the public than that spoken by African Americans. The place of African American English, and the language of African American children in the American social landscape has often been the source of controversy, kindling far ranging debates about such topics as equity in educational policies and practices and linguistic profiling in housing discrimination. Researchers of American English have also long debated the historical origins of African American English and the ongoing relationship between language varieties spoken by African Americans and those spoken by their European American neighbors. Studies have long demonstrated the systematic and rule-governed nature of vernacular African American English, and other non-standard language varieties more generally, yet important questions remain about the origin of African American English varieties, their current and future development, and their relationships to regional European American and other socioethnic varieties. At the same time, important social and educational applications of enhanced knowledge persist about the nature of and socioeducational implications related to non-standard varieties in general and African American English in particular.One of the major hurdles in developing better knowledge about African American English is the lack of publicly available data and detailed information about the variety. Very little research data are available to scholars and educators beyond those data they collect privately for their own purposes. This award supports the creation of the first public corpus of African American English. Through the award, researchers are building a large collection of linguistically annotated spoken language data along with publicly oriented web-based resources. These resources will enable a wide-range of researchers, as well as the public, to more robustly understand the variety. Corpora such as these are also important for developing language technologies, such as speech-to-text software, and lead to better human-computer interaction.