Seminar on Endangered Languages
Alan W Black, Bob Frederking, Lori Levin and Laura Tomokiyo
We are pleased to announce a new seminar, being offered now, Fall 2010. The purpose
of this seminar is to allow students to better understand the linguistic, social and political
issues when working with language technologies for endangered languages. Often in LTI
we concentrate on issues of modeling with small amounts of data, or designing optimal
strategies for collecting data, but ignore many of wider practical issues that appear when
working with endangered languages.
This seminar will consist of reading books and papers, and having participants
give presentations; a few invited talks (e.g. from field linguists, and language advocates)
will also be included. It will count for 6 units of LTI course credit. It may be possible
for interested students to also carry out a related 6-unit project as a lab.
Weekly meetings will be 1.5 hours, at a time suitable for attendees; our initial
suggestion is 3:00-4:30pm on Tuesdays, starting this Tuesday, August 24, in GHC 5510.
Grade will be based on presentations and class participation.
We list below the topics to be covered, possible guest speakers, and our initial list
of possible readings.
Please reply to this email if interested, or if you have any questions.
Topics will include:
What are endangered languages
Linguistics of Endangered Languages
More variation, less information, more mixed with nearby languages
Sharing knowledge from other linguistically close languages
Sociolinguistic issues
Preservation and avoiding change vs. natural language change
Dealing with rival dialects/close languages
Creolization, sociology of high/low prestige dialects, register/code switching
Which technologies are practical
What is feasible to construct
What is actually useful, what isn’t
What are the technical/formal tools one uses to gather data and represent it
Orthography of low resource languages
Use of alphabets from other languages (which more people can use),
Standardization of Languages
Access to and aid from native experts
Managing their expectations
Cultural issues: gender issues, reluctance to criticize, activist militancy
Ethics: making contributions to their communities
Managing their time and contributions efficiently
Using non-LT experts to do LT annotation tasks
Evaluation
How can you measure technical success for one language
What does success mean globally across all ELs
Data collection
How can you work with communities to collect information
How can we work with legacy data where it exists
Sustainability
How collection/development continue
Unconfirmed list of possible guest lecturers:
Delyth Prys on Welsh Language Revitalization
Steven Bird on Language Documentation
David Mortensen on Field Linguistics
Meg Noori on Chippewa/Ojibwe
Initial list of likely readings:
Crystal, D. “Language Death” Cambridge University Press, 2000.
K. Hale, M. Krauss, L. Watahomigie, A. Yamamoto, C. Craig, L. Masayesva Jeanne, and
N. England. Endangered Languages. Language 68(1), pp. 1-42, 1992.
Peter Ladefoged. Another view of endangered languages. Language 68(4), pp. 809-811,
1992.
Davel, M. and Barnard E. “The Efficient generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries:
Human Factors during Bootstrapping”, Interspeech 2004, Jeju, Korea, 2004.
Haspelmath, M, Dryer, M.S., Gil, D., and Comrie, B. (eds) (2005) World Atlas of
Language Structures, Oxford University Press. [As a reference work.]
NeSmith, R. Keao, “Tūtū’s Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo Hawaiian Language”,
in ‘Owihi Journal,Volume 3, “Huliau (Time of Change)”. Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui,
editor. ISBN 0-9668220-3-X 2005.
Payne, T. (1997). Describing Morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists, Cambridge
University Press.
Rice, K. and Saxon, L. (2002) “Issues of Standardization and Community in Aboriginal
Language Lexicography” in Willam Frawley, Kenneth C. Hill, and Pamela Munro (eds),
Making dictionaries: preserving indigenous languages of the Americas. University of
California Press, Chapter 6 125-154.
Schultz, T., Black, A., Badasker, S., Hornyak, M. and Kominek, J. “SPICE: Wed-based
tools for Rapid Language Adaptation in Speech Processing Systems”, Interspeech 2007,
Antwerp, Belgium 2007.
Joshua A. Fishman. Language Maintenance and Language Shift as a Field of Inquiry: a
Definition of the Field and Suggestions for its Further Development. Linguistics 2(9),
Pages 32–70, ISSN (Online) 1613-396X, ISSN (Print) 0024-3949, DOI:
10.1515/ling.1964.2.9.32, 1964. Published Online: 19/11/2009. http://www.referenceglobal.com/doi/abs/10.1515/ling.1964.2.9.32
Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language contact, creolization, and
genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07893-4.
“The Linguists.” PBS documentary film on two linguists trying to save the world’s
endangered languages. http://thelinguists.com/
Sherwani CMU PhD thesis: Speech Interfaces for Information Access by Low-Literate
Users in the Developing World. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/JS-thesis.pdf
Font-Llijtos CMU PhD thesis: Interactive and Automatic Refinement of Translation
Rules for a Transfer-based MT systems. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aria/thesis/FontLlitjosDissertation-2007.pdf
Kominek CMU PhD thesis: TTS from Zero.
http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Thesis/john_kominek.pdf
Selections from:
SaltMil conference series. http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/index.php/en/activities-mainmenu73/saltmil-workshops-mainmenu-77
Aflat conference series. http://aflat.org/
The 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation
(ICLDC). http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ICLDC/2009/
Saving Languages: An introduction to language revitalization.
Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, Cambridge University Press. 2006.
Language and National Identity in Africa.
Andrew Simpson (ed.), Oxford University Press. 2008.
Language and National Identity in Asia.
Andrew Simpson (ed.), Oxford University Press. 2007.