Publications (9)
AlloVera: A Multilingual Allophone Database
David R. Mortensen, Xinjian Li, Patrick Littell +6
We introduce a new resource, AlloVera, which provides mappings from 218 allophones to phonemes for 14 languages. Phonemes are contrastive phonological units, and allophones are the…
Learning Language Representations for Typology Prediction
Chaitanya Malaviya, Graham Neubig, Patrick Littell
One central mystery of neural NLP is what neural models "know" about their subject matter. When a neural machine translation system learns to translate from one language to another…
Polyglot Neural Language Models: A Case Study in Cross-Lingual Phonetic Representation Learning
Yulia Tsvetkov, Sunayana Sitaram, Manaal Faruqui +6
We introduce polyglot language models, recurrent neural network models trained to predict symbol sequences in many different languages using shared representations of symbols and c…
A Summary of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Language Documentation and Revitalization
Graham Neubig, Shruti Rijhwani, Alexis Palmer +21
Despite recent advances in natural language processing and other language technology, the application of such technology to language documentation and conservation has been limited…
Towards a General-Purpose Linguistic Annotation Backend
Graham Neubig, Patrick Littell, Chian-Yu Chen +4
Language documentation is inherently a time-intensive process; transcription, glossing, and corpus management consume a significant portion of documentary linguists' work. Advances…
Universal Phone Recognition with a Multilingual Allophone System
Xinjian Li, Siddharth Dalmia, Juncheng Li +8
Multilingual models can improve language processing, particularly for low resource situations, by sharing parameters across languages. Multilingual acoustic models, however, genera…
Supporting SENCOTEN Language Documentation Efforts with Automatic Speech Recognition
Mengzhe Geng, Patrick Littell, Aidan Pine +3
The SENCOTEN language, spoken on the Saanich peninsula of southern Vancouver Island, is in the midst of vigorous language revitalization efforts to turn the tide of language loss a…
Neural Polysynthetic Language Modelling
Lane Schwartz, Francis Tyers, Lori Levin +18
Research in natural language processing commonly assumes that approaches that work well for English and and other widely-used languages are "language agnostic". In high-resource la…
Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning
Yu-Hsiang Lin, Chian-Yu Chen, Jean Lee +10
Cross-lingual transfer, where a high-resource transfer language is used to improve the accuracy of a low-resource task language, is now an invaluable tool for improving performance…