Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE): large-scale digital analysis of a spoken language across space and time

这个项目的重点是新的和快速的方法来分析跨方言的语音-在这里，英语的方言，但这个过程最终可以用于任何语言。研究人员采用计算机科学的方法，并将其与语音科学，语言学和数字人文学的工具和方法相结合，以客观地了解大西洋两岸英语方言的声音现在和过去的变化程度。人文和社会科学领域的学者已经习惯性地快速、轻松地分析大量的书面英语。 事实上，任何人都可以使用电子工具搜索文本，并在几秒钟内获得可以看到的摘要。然而，语音研究现在才进入自己的“大数据”革命。过去的语言学研究往往对一种或几种语言或方言的言语的几个方面进行详细的分析。目前的言语研究规模已经塑造了我们对口语的理解和我们提出的各种问题。今天，大量的数字化转录语音集合可以从多种语言中获得，收集这些数据的目的有很多：从口述历史到用于训练语音识别系统的大型数据集，再到法律的和政治互动。复杂的语音处理工具可以用来分析这些数据，但它们需要大量的技术技能。结合这些数据和工具，语言学家可以回答有关口语的性质和发展的基本问题。这个合作项目旨在建立关键工具，使大规模的语音研究变得像大规模文本挖掘一样强大和普遍。这种快速轻松地分析许多英语方言中的语音的能力应该适用于语音的计算，法医和临床方法，以及法医和临床语音应用，并对文学学者，社会学家，人类学家，历史学家，政治学家有用。该项目的成果将通过一个互动的声音地图网站与公众分享。该奖项是第四轮挖掘数据挑战赛的一部分，该挑战赛是一个国际资助机会，旨在促进各国之间的研究合作，并鼓励创新方法来分析社会科学和人文科学中的大型数据集。美国的研究人员将与加拿大和英国的学者合作。来实现这个项目的目标。

This project focuses on new and fast ways to analyze speech across dialects--here, dialects of English, but the process can eventually be used for any language. The researchers take methods from computer science and put them to work with tools and methods from speech science, linguistics and digital humanities to find out objectively how much the sounds of English dialects across the Atlantic vary now and in the past. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences already routinely analyze huge amounts of written English quickly and easily. In fact, the electronic tools for searching texts and, within seconds, obtaining summaries that one can see are available to anyone. However, speech research is only now entering its own "big data" revolution. Past linguistic research tended to carry out detailed analyses of a few aspects of speech from one or a few languages or dialects. The current scale of speech research studies has shaped our understanding of spoken language and the kinds of questions that we ask. Today, massive digital collections of transcribed speech are available from many languages, gathered for numerous purposes: from oral histories to large datasets for training speech recognition systems to legal and political interactions. Sophisticated speech processing tools exist to analyze these data, but they require substantial technical skill. Combining these data and tools allows linguists to answer fundamental questions about the nature and development of spoken language. This collaborative project seeks to establish the key tools to enable large-scale speech research to become as powerful and pervasive as large-scale text mining. This ability to quickly and easily analyze speech in many English dialects should be applicable in computational, forensic, and clinical approaches to speech, and forensic and clinical speech applications, and useful to literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists. What is learned from this project will be shared with the public through an interactive sound mapping website.This award was made as part of Round 4 of the Digging Into Data Challenge, an international funding opportunity designed to foster research collaboration across countries and to encourage innovative approaches to analyzing large data sets in the social sciences and humanities. The U.S based researchers will collaborate with scholars in Canada and the U.K. to achieve the goals of this project.