Automatic Alignment and Analysis of Linguistic Change.

北美英语地图集基于对5万人口以上的城市的研究，表明由于元音系统的持续变化，美国地区方言的差异越来越大，导致不同方言之间存在相当大的误解。要理解这一过程，就需要对更多的社区和发言者进行研究。然而，目前使用的分析方法需要几天或几周才能准确地定义单个说话人的元音系统。该项目基于一种加速方法，该方法使用声波和转录的自动对齐，在所需时间的百分之一内产生十倍于所需时间的数据。将开发自动测量抄本中每个元音的方法，其错误率等于或低于人工测量的错误率。这些技术将在一个关于大都市社区语言变化的非常大的数据库上进行测试，这些数据库是1973年至2008年在费城社区每年记录的一系列访谈。方言多样性是限制自动语音识别成功的主要因素之一，并为我们理解语言变化的原因提供了重大挑战。该项目开发的方法将有助于加快其他社区和其他语言的社会语言学分析。费城数据库的分析结果将有助于理解正在进行的语言变化中的性别差异，变化方向的逆转，以及变化在社区之间的传播。

The Atlas of North American English, based on the study of cities over 50,000 population, shows that American regional dialects are becoming increasingly different as a result of ongoing changes in their vowel systems, leading to considerable miscomprehension across dialects. An understanding of this process calls for studies of many more communities and speakers. However, currently used methods of analysis require several days or weeks to accurately define the vowel system of a single speaker. This project is based on an accelerated method that produces ten times as much data in one hundredth of the time required, using automatic alignment of the sound wave and transcriptions. Methods will be developed for automatically measuring each vowel in the transcript with an error rate equal to or lower than that of manual measurement. These techniques will be tested on a very large database on change in the speech of a metropolitan community, a series of interviews recorded annually in Philadelphia neighborhoods from 1973 to 2008.Dialect diversity is one of the major factors limiting the success of automatic speech recognition and provides a major challenge for our understanding of the causes of language change. The methods developed in this project will serve to accelerate sociolinguistic analysis across other communities and other languages. Findings from the analysis of the Philadelphia database will contribute to the understanding of gender differentiation in language change in progress, the reversal of the direction of change, and the diffusion of change across neighborhoods.