EL-STEC: Shared Task Evaluation Campaigns with Endangered Language Data

实地语言学家的共同努力不足以记录预计在本世纪末消失的数千种语言。为这些正在消失的语言创造一个持久的记录是至关重要的，因为所有的语言都提供了人类如何学习和处理语言的线索。 通过在现有的和不断增长的数字音频和视频语言数据库上部署计算分析技术，可以促进语言描述和分析。本项目将组织一个研讨会，汇集语音和语言技术研究人员、濒危语言研究人员、现场语言学家和语言库档案管理员，以帮助推动这种计算技术的发展。 研讨会的参与者将讨论共享任务评估活动（STECs）如何促进语音和语言技术的发展，以记录濒危和低资源语言。 共享任务评估活动旨在实现跨系统的可比性并利用数据准备的成本，它将研究问题作为开放给研究人员参与的任务来操作，具有统一的数据、任务规范、评估指标以及结果和系统方法的开放报告。语音和语言技术的STECs经验表明，它们有助于标准化共享数据，创建有用的评估工具，并为发布、比较和讨论结果提供场所。参与者将评估可用于计算处理的语言档案数据和应进行的STEC类型。 研讨会的成果可以通过加速濒危语言文档的编制、加强数字语言档案以及为低资源语言开发新的计算技术来产生长期影响。

The combined efforts of field linguists will not be sufficient to document the thousands of languages that are expected to disappear by the end of this century. Creating a lasting record of these disappearing languages is essential since all languages provide clues about how humans learn and process language. Language description and analysis could be facilitated by deploying computational analytic techniques on existing and ever growing repositories of digital audio and video language data.This project will organize a workshop bringing together researchers in speech and language technology, researchers on endangered languages, field linguists, and language repository archivists to help drive the development of this computational technology. The workshop participants will discuss how Shared Task Evaluation Campaigns (STECs) can promote the development of speech and language technology for documenting endangered and low-resourced languages. Designed to enable comparability across systems and leverage the costs of data preparation, Shared Task Evaluation Campaigns operationalize research problems as tasks that are open to participation by researchers with uniform data, task specifications, evaluation metrics, and open reporting of results and system methodologies.Experience with STECs for speech and language technologies has shown that they have helped standardize shared data, create useful evaluation tools, and provide venues for publishing, comparing, and discussing results. Participants will evaluate both the language archive data available for computational processing and the types of STECs that should be undertaken. The results of the workshop can have long term impacts through acceleration of endangered language documentation, enhancement of digital language archives, and development of novel computational techniques for low-resource languages.