TY - JOUR
T1 - Sparse Transcription
AU - Bird, Steven
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - The transcription bottleneck is often cited as a major obstacle for efforts to document the world’s endangered languages and supply them with language technologies. One solution is to extend methods from automatic speech recognition and machine translation, and recruit linguists to provide narrow phonetic transcriptions and sentence-aligned translations. However, I believe that these approaches are not a good fit with the available data and skills, or with long-established practices that are essentially word based. In seeking a more effective approach, I consider a century of transcription practice and a wide range of computational approaches, before proposing a computational model based on spoken term detection which I call “sparse transcription.” This represents a shift away from current assumptions that we transcribe phones, transcribe fully, and transcribe first. Instead, sparse transcription combines the older practice of word-level transcription with interpretive, iterative, and interactive processes which are amenable to wider participation and which open the way to new methods for processing oral languages.
AB - The transcription bottleneck is often cited as a major obstacle for efforts to document the world’s endangered languages and supply them with language technologies. One solution is to extend methods from automatic speech recognition and machine translation, and recruit linguists to provide narrow phonetic transcriptions and sentence-aligned translations. However, I believe that these approaches are not a good fit with the available data and skills, or with long-established practices that are essentially word based. In seeking a more effective approach, I consider a century of transcription practice and a wide range of computational approaches, before proposing a computational model based on spoken term detection which I call “sparse transcription.” This represents a shift away from current assumptions that we transcribe phones, transcribe fully, and transcribe first. Instead, sparse transcription combines the older practice of word-level transcription with interpretive, iterative, and interactive processes which are amenable to wider participation and which open the way to new methods for processing oral languages.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097917739&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/COLI_a_00387
DO - 10.1162/COLI_a_00387
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097917739
VL - 46
SP - 713
EP - 744
JO - Computational Linguistics
JF - Computational Linguistics
SN - 0891-2017
IS - 4
ER -