This project approaches the problem of language documentation and revitalization from a rather untraditional angle. To improve and facilitate language documentation of endangered languages, we attempt to use corpus linguistic methods and speech and language technologies to reduce the time needed for transcription and annotation of audio and video language recordings. The paper demonstrates this approach on the example of the endangered and seriously under-resourced variety of Eastern Chatino (CTP). We show how initial speech corpora can be created that can facilitate the development of speech and language technologies for under-resourced languages by utilizing Forced Alignment tools to time align transcriptions. Time-aligned transcriptions can be used to train speech corpora and utilize automatic speech recognition tools for the transcription and annotation of untranscribed data. Speech technologies can be used to reduce the time and effort necessary for transcription and annotation of large collections of audio and video recordings in digital language archives, addressing the transcription bottleneck problem that most language archives and many under-documented languages are confronted with. This approach can increase the availability of language resources from low-resourced and endangered languages to speech and language technology research and development.

The infrastructure Global Open Resources and Information for Language and Linguistic Analysis (GORILLA) was created as a resource that provides a bridge between disciplines such as documentary, theoretical, and corpus linguistics, speech and language technologies, and digital language archiving services. GORILLA is designed as an interface between digital language archive services and language data producers. It addresses various problems of common digital language archive infrastructures. At the same time it serves the speech and language technology communities by providing a platform to create and share speech and language data from low-resourced and endangered languages. It hosts an initial collection of language models for speech and natural language processing (NLP), and technologies or software tools for corpus creation and annotation. GORILLA is designed to address the Transcription Bottleneck in language documentation, and, at the same time to provide solutions to the general Language Resource Bottleneck in speech and language technologies. It does so by facilitating the cooperation between documentary and theoretical linguistics, and speech and language technologies research and development, in particular for low-resourced and endangered languages.

To create automatic transcription and annotation tools for the AHEYM corpus of recorded interviews with Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe we develop initial Yiddish language resources that are used for adaptations of speech and language technologies. Our project aims at the development of resources and technologies that can make the entire AHEYM corpus and other Yiddish resources more accessible to not only the community of Yiddish speakers or linguists with language expertise, but also historians and experts from other disciplines or the general public. In this paper we describe the rationale behind our approach, the procedures and methods, and challenges that are not specific to the AHEYM corpus, but apply to all documentary language data that is collected in the field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to create a speech corpus and speech technologies for Yiddish. This is also the first attempt to work out speech and language technologies to transcribe and translate a large collection of Yiddish spoken language resources.

MultiTree is an NFS-funded project collecting scholarly hypotheses about language relationships, and visualizing them on a web site in the form of trees or graphs. Two open online interfaces allow scholars, students, and the general public an easy access to search for language information or comparisons of competing hypotheses. One objective of the project was to facilitate research in historical linguistics. MultiTree has evolved to a much more powerful tool, it is not just a simple repository of scholarly information. In this paper we present the MultiTree interfaces and the impact of the project beyond the field of historical linguistics, including, among others, the use of standardized ISO language codes, and creating an interconnected database of language and dialect names, codes, publications, and authors. Further, we offer the dissemination of linguistic findings world-wide to both scholars and the general public, thus boosting the collaboration and accelerating the scientific exchange. We discuss also the ways MultiTree will develop beyond the time of the duration of the funding.