Integrating, Disseminating, and Archiving Components of the Shoshoni Language Project

美国国会于1990年通过的《美洲原住民语言法案》承认了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-阿兹特克语族最北的成员，从怀俄明州到中美洲都使用这种语言。今天，肖肖尼语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，犹他大学已故的威克·r·米勒（Wick R. Miller）从几个不同的品种中记录了肖肖尼语（生于1875-1920年）的使用者，代表了大盆地语言中最广泛的文献语料，对西部各州的几个部落社区具有至关重要的文化、历史和语言重要性。以往对Shoshoni语的语言学研究主要集中在孤立句的内部结构和词的结构上，而本项目将重点研究其语音系统和语篇层次结构。更广泛的影响包括万豪图书馆（犹他大学）和加州语言档案馆（加州大学伯克利分校）的这两个语料库作为免费在线资源的可用性。该项目还将为来自讲shoshoni语部落社区的大学生提供有关计算语言学研究项目的宝贵经验，并加强这些年轻人与合作开展该项目的两位讲母语的长者之间的互动。该团队还将制作威克·r·米勒合集的一部分传统故事的印刷版和易于阅读的电子版，并将它们分发给参与该项目的三个社区，即Te-Moak部落的南福克部落委员会、Goshute保留地的联盟部落和Ely Shoshone部落。虽然肖肖尼语作为一种美洲土著语言有相当多的文献记载，但它的话语结构、语音和音系学研究相对较少。因此，两个语料库的发展将弥补这些重大差距。首先，这36个故事将被标记，以产生一个可电子搜索的数据库，对句子水平和话语水平的语言学研究都很有价值。其次，一个语音和语音上有价值的语料库，由单词和句子大小的录音音频- textgrid对组成，这些录音将被强制对齐和微调。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。对于英语、德语、日语和西班牙语等大多数语言来说，这种文本到音频的对齐语料库已经存在，这使得它们的声音系统相对容易学习，从而导致了能够快速处理口语的电子产品的发展。这些大多数语言的语料库是使用昂贵的，特定于语言的计算工具，称为强制对齐器。我们的项目将训练蒙特利尔强制对齐器来对齐4000 - 5000个Shoshoni单词和短句的文本。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为任何小型的、未充分研究的语言对齐文本到音频数据。由此产生的强制对齐的Shoshoni语料库将大大加快对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。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.