A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology
Elizabeth Salesky, Eleanor Chodroff, Tiago Pimentel, Matthew Wiesner, Ryan Cotterell, Alan W Black, Jason Eisner
Abstract
A major hurdle in data-driven research on typology is having sufficient data in many languages to draw meaningful conclusions. We present VoxClamantis v1.0, the first large-scale corpus for phonetic typology, with aligned segments and estimated phoneme-level labels in 690 readings spanning 635 languages, along with acoustic-phonetic measures of vowels and sibilants. Access to such data can greatly facilitate investigation of phonetic typology at a large scale and across many languages. However, it is non-trivial and computationally intensive to obtain such alignments for hundreds of languages, many of which have few to no resources presently available. We describe the methodology to create our corpus, discuss caveats with current methods and their impact on the utility of this data, and illustrate possible research directions through a series of case studies on the 48 highest-quality readings. Our corpus and scripts are publicly available for non-commercial use at https://voxclamantisproject.github.io.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.415
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4526–4546
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.acl-main.415/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.415
- Cite (ACL):
- Elizabeth Salesky, Eleanor Chodroff, Tiago Pimentel, Matthew Wiesner, Ryan Cotterell, Alan W Black, and Jason Eisner. 2020. A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4526–4546, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology (Salesky et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.acl-main.415.pdf
- Data
- VoxClamantis