RI: Small: Language Induction meets Language Documentation: Leveraging bilingual aligned audio for learning and preserving languages

世界上有成千上万的语言在被系统地记录下来之前就面临着灭绝的危险。许多其他语言有成千上万的使用者，但它们只以口头形式存在，文献记录很少。因此，有关人类语言和文化的重要知识来源无法获得，并有可能永远失去。此外，很难开发处理这些语言的技术，使他们的语言社区处于日益扩大的数字鸿沟的另一边。解决这些问题的第一步是语言记录，所以这个项目的目标是开发基于自动语音识别和机器翻译的计算方法，以前所未有的规模记录濒危和不成文的语言。为了取得成功，任何方法都必须保证其生成的文档的充分性和可解释性。该项目通过结合使用社区外展、众包技术和移动/网络技术来收集数百小时（数百万字）的演讲，从而确保了足够的内容。可解释性是通过增加原始语音记录，逐字重复以及翻译成资源丰富的语言来实现的。最后，开发了计算模型来自动转录录音并与翻译对齐，从而生成双语对齐的文本。其结果是一种数字罗塞塔石碑：一种大型钥匙，可以解释世界上的语言，即使它们没有书面形式，甚至不再使用口语。

Thousands of the world's languages are in danger of dying out before they have been systematically documented. Many other languages have millions of speakers, yet they exist only in spoken form, and minimal documentary records are available. As a consequence, important sources of knowledge about human language and culture are inaccessible, and at risk of being lost forever. Moreover, it is difficult to develop technologies for processing these languages, leaving their speech communities on the far side of a widening digital divide. The first step to solving these problems is language documentation, and so the goal of this project is to develop computational methods based on automatic speech recognition and machine translation for documenting endangered and unwritten languages on an unprecedented scale.To be successful, any approach must guarantee both the sufficiency and interpretability of the documentation it produces. This project ensures sufficiency by using a combination of community outreach, crowdsourcing techniques, and mobile/web technologies to collect hundreds of hours (millions of words) of speech. The interpretability is enabled by augmenting original speech recordings with careful verbatim repetitions along with translations into a well-resourced language. Finally, computational models are developed to automate transcription of recordings and alignment with translations, resulting in bilingual aligned text. The result is a kind of digital Rosetta Stone: a large-scale key for interpreting the world's languages even if they are not written, or no longer even spoken.