Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” Used as a Rosetta Stone to Extract and Map Spoken Words in Under-resourced Languages

Elena Knyazeva, Philippe Boula de Mareüil, Frédéric Vernier


Abstract
This paper describes a method of semi-automatic word spotting in minority languages, from one and the same Aesop fable “The North Wind and the Sun” translated in Romance languages/dialects from Hexagonal (i.e. Metropolitan) France and languages from French Polynesia. The first task consisted of finding out how a dozen words such as “wind” and “sun” were translated in over 200 versions collected in the field — taking advantage of orthographic similarity, word position and context. Occurrences of the translations were then extracted from the phone-aligned recordings. The results were judged accurate in 96–97% of cases, both on the development corpus and a test set of unseen data. Corrected alignments were then mapped and basemaps were drawn to make various linguistic phenomena immediately visible. The paper exemplifies how regular expressions may be used for this purpose. The final result, which takes the form of an online speaking atlas (enriching the https://atlas.limsi.fr website), enables us to illustrate lexical, morphological or phonetic variation.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.223
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2072–2079
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.223
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Knyazeva, Philippe Boula de Mareüil, and Frédéric Vernier. 2022. Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” Used as a Rosetta Stone to Extract and Map Spoken Words in Under-resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2072–2079, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” Used as a Rosetta Stone to Extract and Map Spoken Words in Under-resourced Languages (Knyazeva et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.223.pdf