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

研究人员、媒体和公众对美国英语的关注程度远远超过非裔美国人的英语。非洲裔美国人的英语和非洲裔美国儿童的语言在美国社会中的地位经常是争议的来源，引发了广泛的辩论，如教育政策和实践中的公平以及住房歧视中的语言特征。美国英语的研究人员也一直在争论非洲裔美国人英语的历史起源，以及非洲裔美国人和他们的欧洲裔美国邻居所说的语言变体之间的持续关系。长期以来的研究表明，非洲裔美国人的白话英语和其他非标准语言变体具有系统性和规则性，但关于非洲裔美国人英语变体的起源、它们当前和未来的发展、以及它们与欧洲裔美国人和其他社会种族变体的关系等重要问题仍然存在。与此同时，增强知识的重要社会和教育应用仍然存在，关于非标准英语变体的性质和社会教育含义，特别是非裔美国人英语。发展非裔美国人英语知识的主要障碍之一是缺乏公开可用的数据和关于这种多样性的详细信息。除了那些学者和教育工作者为自己的目的而私下收集的数据外，很少有研究数据可供他们使用。该奖项支持创建第一个非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，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能够更有力地了解这种多样性。像这样的语料库对于开发语言技术也很重要，比如语音转文本软件，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.