Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE100100211
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$650,000.00
Summary
The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and developmen ....The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio-visual speech corpus of Australian English. Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases exist for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there is currently no large auditory-visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. Here we will establish the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support a speech science research and development using Australian English and facilitate the development of Australian speech technology applications from automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis used in taxi and other ordering services, to hearing prostheses and talking head aids for learning-impaired children, and a range of security and forensic applications.Read moreRead less
Australian Laureate Fellowships - Grant ID: FL130100111
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$3,163,655.00
Summary
The wellsprings of linguistic diversity. A quarter of the world's languages are spoken in our region. This project tackles the riddle of why there are so many languages in parts of the world like Australia and New Guinea, and so few in others. Understanding the causes of language diversity will help the countries and communities in our region maintain their rich linguistic heritage.
Understanding Indonesian: developing a machine-usable grammar, dictionary and corpus. Australia's relationship with Indonesia is of great significance. The need for good relationships founded on appreciation of the range of societies and views in modern Indonesia is widely acknowledged. A better knowledge of the languages is essential for this, and so are fast, efficient information gathering systems for processing multilingual sources (including Indonesian text), that can analyse large volumes ....Understanding Indonesian: developing a machine-usable grammar, dictionary and corpus. Australia's relationship with Indonesia is of great significance. The need for good relationships founded on appreciation of the range of societies and views in modern Indonesia is widely acknowledged. A better knowledge of the languages is essential for this, and so are fast, efficient information gathering systems for processing multilingual sources (including Indonesian text), that can analyse large volumes of text. The skills to build such systems exist internationally. Through collaboration with established international teams, we plan to transfer cutting-edge skills in the development of machine-useable grammars to Australian researchers, and to create the language resources essential for understanding Indonesian.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE0560711
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$325,873.00
Summary
PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: Accessibility and Decentralisation. PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, is a collaborative facility established in 2003 to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and musics from the area around Australia. Improvement plans for 2005 include: decentralising audio ingestion; adding audio restoration capabil ....PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: Accessibility and Decentralisation. PARADISEC, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, is a collaborative facility established in 2003 to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and musics from the area around Australia. Improvement plans for 2005 include: decentralising audio ingestion; adding audio restoration capabilities; developing a geographical interface to our collection; web-publishing our catalogue; developing and testing protocols for linking audio with text, images and relevant material in other collections; and participating in international consortia developing standards and tools for management of and access to endangered cultural recordings. Read moreRead less
The English Language: Meaning, History and Culture. The theory developed by the CI (and her colleague Cliff Goddard)contributes to Australia's prestige on the academic scene world-wide and attracts many graduate students to this country. This project should further strengthen its influence.
Australia is a multicultural society, united (but also divided) by the English language. Educating Australians of all backgrounds about the cultural assumptions and values embedded in English is a matter o ....The English Language: Meaning, History and Culture. The theory developed by the CI (and her colleague Cliff Goddard)contributes to Australia's prestige on the academic scene world-wide and attracts many graduate students to this country. This project should further strengthen its influence.
Australia is a multicultural society, united (but also divided) by the English language. Educating Australians of all backgrounds about the cultural assumptions and values embedded in English is a matter of vital national and community interest. The outcome of this project will be an important resource for intercultural training in Australia and other English-speaking countries. The project will enhance Australia's capacity to interpret itself to the world.
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Unlocking the missing Millennia of mainland Southeast Asia. This project will reveal the prehistoric transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age in South and Southeast Asia, the missing Millennia of the archaeological record. Sophisticated linguistic analyses, facilitated by innovative computational methods and bioinformatics, reconstruct the languages, migrations, and societies of the region’s oldest cultures
Change in language, culture and identity in a small isolated speech community: Palmerston Island English. This project will investigate language variation and change through a case study of Palmerston Island, a small, isolated community in the Cook Islands, where a new dialect of English has developed. The relationship between social networks, cultural identity and linguistic variation will be explored.
A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in three Aboriginal communities. The importance of language skills cannot be underestimated, and contribute to 'a healthy start to life'. In multilingual Indigenous communities, children must negotiate the complexities of different languages used for different purposes. This project will provide detailed insights into how children manage differences between home and school language, the kinds of problems they encounter when the ....A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in three Aboriginal communities. The importance of language skills cannot be underestimated, and contribute to 'a healthy start to life'. In multilingual Indigenous communities, children must negotiate the complexities of different languages used for different purposes. This project will provide detailed insights into how children manage differences between home and school language, the kinds of problems they encounter when they enter the school system, and how their languages develop over the first four crucial years of school which provide the foundation for the children's future education. Their ability to manage the language of school underpins their ability to lead successful and engaged lives as adults. Read moreRead less
The languages of Southern New Guinea. This project will investigate, analyse and record the barely-known languages of Southern New Guinea, stretching across Papua New Guinea and Indonesia just kilometres from Australia's borders. It will produce grammatical descriptions for ten of the thirty languages of the area, plus a comparative database and handbook of the languages of this strategic region.
Reconstructing Eastern Himalayan Histories: languages, plants, and people. This project combines linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork to produce documentations of Bhutan's East-Bodish (Tibeto-Burman) speaking peoples, with an ultimate aim to reconstruct the social history of this group. The linguistic fieldwork will focus on different semantic domains, including religion, agriculture, and ethnobotany and grammatical features as different lenses into the past. The anthropological research will b ....Reconstructing Eastern Himalayan Histories: languages, plants, and people. This project combines linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork to produce documentations of Bhutan's East-Bodish (Tibeto-Burman) speaking peoples, with an ultimate aim to reconstruct the social history of this group. The linguistic fieldwork will focus on different semantic domains, including religion, agriculture, and ethnobotany and grammatical features as different lenses into the past. The anthropological research will bring new ethnographic light in to supplement the linguistic picture of the past, including religious practices and social organisation. Situated squarely within the eastern Himalayas, this project will provide new and crucial insights into the prehistory of Asia.Read moreRead less