Decoding Hidden Heritages in Gaelic Traditional Narrative with Text-Mining and Phylogenetics

这个项目将融合深入的定性分析和尖端的计算方法，以解码、解释和策划盖尔语传统叙事的隐藏遗产。我们将提供迄今为止两国叙事传统中的相似和不同之处的最详细说明，进而对它们共同的文化史有一个新的理解。利用语言技术的最新进展，我们将数字化、转换和提供大量爱尔兰语和苏格兰盖尔语的民俗手稿。反过来，这种新的数字资源将促进对盖尔语语音技术的正在进行的研究。这个项目提出的主要问题是：大量的传统叙事数字集合能告诉我们关于苏格兰和爱尔兰之间历史文化交流的什么？虽然我们将研究不同类型的传统叙事，但我们将专注于爱尔兰和苏格兰盖尔语的国际故事。《国际故事》是广泛分布于世界各地的民间故事，如《灰姑娘》或《白雪公主》。其中一些是人类口头文化中已知的最古老的方面，可以追溯到5000年前或更久。由于他们的年龄和他们在地理上的不同倾向，他们可以告诉我们许多关于不同聚居地之间的关系。在这项研究中，我们将它们作为了解苏格兰和爱尔兰之间以及每个国家内部存在的早期通信网络的工具。通过一种被称为文本挖掘的方法，我们将使用人工智能来搜索故事中类似的主题、短语和其他语言模式。我们在文本之间找到的匹配将与我们对文本本身的了解相关联。使用另一种称为系统发育网络分析的方法，我们将梳理文本主题与制作它们的人之间的关系：例如，它们的性别、居住地和工作性质。最后，我们将结合这两种方法，对苏格兰和爱尔兰的口头叙事进行统一的描述。这项工作将改变我们对盖尔语口头文化的理解，并在网上向不同的最终用户传播独特的档案材料。最后，它将通过创造和进一步促进重要的语言技术(如手写识别、机器翻译和自动语音识别)，对盖尔语社区的可持续性产生积极影响。

This project will fuse deep, qualitative analysis with cutting-edge computational methods to decode, interpret and curate the hidden heritages of Gaelic traditional narrative. We will provide the most detailed account to date of similarities and differences in the countries' narrative traditions and, by extension, a novel understanding of their joint cultural history. Using recent advances in language technology, we will digitise, convert and make available a vast collection of folklore manuscripts in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In turn, this new digital resource will catalyse ongoing research into Gaelic speech technology.The main question that this project poses is: What can a large, digital collection of traditional narrative tell us about historical cultural exchanges between Scotland and Ireland? While we will examine different kinds of traditional narrative, we will concentrate upon International Tales in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. International Tales are folk narratives that are widely scattered across the world, such as Cinderella or Snow White. Some are amongst the oldest known facets of human oral culture, dating back 5000 years or more. Due to their age and their tendency to vary geographically, they can tell us a lot about relationships between different settlements of people. In this study, we use them as a vehicle for understanding early communication networks between Scotland and Ireland, as well as those that existed within each country. Through an approach known as text-mining, we will use artificial intelligence to search the tales for similar topics, phrases and other linguistic patterns. The matches that we find between texts will be correlated with what we know about the texts themselves. Using another approach, known as phylogenetic network analysis, we will comb relationships between the texts' themes and the people who produced them: for example, their genders, where they lived and what they did for work. In the end, we will combine the two approaches towards a unified account of Scottish and Irish oral narrative. This work will transform our understanding about Gaelic oral culture and disseminate unique archival material online to a diverse set of end-users. Finally, it will positively impact the sustainability of Gaelic-speaking communities through the creation and further stimulation of important language technologies (e.g. handwriting recognition, machine translation and automatic speech recognition).