Integrating Automatic Transcription into the Language Documentation Workflow: Experiments with Na Data and the Persephone Toolkit

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dc.contributor.author Michaud, Alexis
dc.contributor.author Adams, Oliver
dc.contributor.author Cohn, Trevor Anthony
dc.contributor.author Neubig, Graham
dc.contributor.author Guillaume, Séverine
dc.date.accessioned 2018-09-09T03:11:07Z
dc.date.available 2018-09-09T03:11:07Z
dc.date.issued 2018-09
dc.description.abstract Automatic speech recognition tools have potential for facilitating language documentation, but in practice these tools remain little-used by linguists for a variety of reasons, such as that the technology is still new (and evolving rapidly), user-friendly interfaces are still under development, and case studies demonstrating the practical usefulness of automatic recognition in a low-resource setting remain few. This article reports on a success story in integrating automatic transcription into the language documentation workflow, specifically for Yongning Na, a language of Southwest China. Using Persephone, an open-source toolkit, a single-speaker speech transcription tool was trained over five hours of manually transcribed speech. The experiments found that this method can achieve a remarkably low error rate (on the order of 17%), and that automatic transcriptions were useful as a canvas for the linguist. The present report is intended for linguists with little or no knowledge of speech processing. It aims to provide insights into (i) the way the tool operates and (ii) the process of collaborating with natural language processing specialists. Practical recommendations are offered on how to anticipate the requirements of this type of technology from the early stages of data collection in the field.
dc.description.sponsorship National Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.format.extent 37 pages
dc.identifier.citation Michaud, Alexis, Oliver Adams, Trevor Anthony Cohn, Graham Neubig & Séverine Guillaume. 2018. Integrating Automatic Transcription into the Language Documentation Workflow: Experiments with Na Data and the Persephone Toolkit. Language Documentation & Conservation 12. 393-429.
dc.identifier.issn 1934-5275
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24793
dc.language.iso en-US
dc.publisher University of Hawaii Press
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
dc.subject language documentation
dc.subject automatic speech transcription
dc.subject automatic speech recognition
dc.subject natural language processing
dc.subject endangered languages
dc.subject sound archive
dc.subject multimedia corpora
dc.subject interdisciplinarity
dc.subject open-source software
dc.subject open access
dc.title Integrating Automatic Transcription into the Language Documentation Workflow: Experiments with Na Data and the Persephone Toolkit
dc.type Article
dc.type.dcmi Text
prism.endingpage 513
prism.startingpage 481
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Volume 12 : Language Documentation & Conservation