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.

1990年美国国会通过的《美洲原住民语言法》承认美洲原住民语言的独特地位和价值。肖肖尼语[ISO 639-3 shh]是乌托-阿兹特克语族中最北的一个成员，从怀俄明州到中美洲都有人使用。Shoshoni语言今天仍然是戈舒特和肖肖尼部落身份的重要组成部分。在20世纪60 - 70年代，已故的Wick R.犹他州大学的米勒用磁带记录了Shoshoni（出生于1875-1920年）的几个不同变体，代表了任何大盆地语言中最广泛的文献语料库，对西部各州的几个部落社区具有重要的文化，历史和语言重要性。过去对Shoshoni的语言学研究主要集中在句子的内部结构和单词的结构上，而本项目将重点关注其声音系统和话语层次的结构。更广泛的影响包括两个语料库作为免费在线资源从万豪图书馆（犹他州大学）和加州语言档案（加州大学伯克利分校）的可用性。 该项目还将为来自Shoshoni语部落社区的本科生提供计算语言研究项目的宝贵经验，并加强这些年轻人与合作该项目的两位母语长者之间的互动。该小组还将制作一个印刷版和一个易于阅读的电子版的一个子集的传统故事，从威克R。米勒收集和传播他们到三个社区合作的项目，南福克乐队理事会的特莫克部落，联合部落的戈舒特保留和伊利肖肖尼部落。虽然肖肖尼是相当完善的文件美洲土著语言，其话语结构和语音和音韵学是相对欠研究。因此，这些重大差距将通过开发两个语料库来弥补。 首先，这36个故事将被标记，以产生一个电子搜索的数据库，对写作水平以及语篇水平的语言学研究有价值。第二，一个语音和语音有价值的语料库，包括audio-TextGrid对单词和录音大小的录音，这将是力对齐和微调。在生成的语料库中，代表每个元音和辅音的音素将与声音文件的相应部分对齐，使研究人员能够自动对每个声音进行声学语音分析。 这种文本到音频对齐的语料库已经存在于大多数语言中，如英语，德语，日语和西班牙语，使它们的声音系统相对容易学习，从而导致可以快速处理口语的电子产品的开发。 这些大多数语言语料库是使用昂贵的，语言特定的计算工具，称为强制对齐。 我们的项目将训练蒙特利尔强制对齐器将4，000 - 5，000个Shoshoni单词和短句的文本与声音对齐。这样做将提供一个模型，说明如何廉价地使用通用的强制对齐器来对齐任何小的、未充分研究的语言的文本到音频数据。 由此产生的强制对齐Shoshoni语料库将大大加快这种语音复杂语言的声学分析，并导致许多相对便宜，但深入，科学合理的研究研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。