Claire Bowern


2025

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Multilingual MFA: Forced Alignment on Low-Resource Related Languages
Alessio Tosolini | Claire Bowern
Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

We compare the outcomes of multilingual and crosslingual training for related and unrelated Australian languages with similar phonologi- cal inventories. We use the Montreal Forced Aligner to train acoustic models from scratch and adapt a large English model, evaluating results against seen data, unseen data (seen lan- guage), and unseen data and language. Results indicate benefits of adapting the English base- line model for previously unseen languages.

2023

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FileLingR: An R Script validation tool for depositors and users of digital language collections
Irene Yi | Claire Bowern
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

2019

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Semantic Change and Semantic Stability: Variation is Key
Claire Bowern
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate models in Pama-Nyungan to identify meaning classes most appropriate for lexical phylogenetic inference, particularly highlighting the importance of variation in studying change over time.