Upcoming events
Event Information:
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Thu13Jun20242:00 pmLokaal 3.30 - Camelot, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren
Giuseppe Magistro (UGent) - "Creating a corpus of web-data with Pyrlato. A demonstration"
Show contentThe use of corpora in acoustic analyses has become a standard practice in phonetic phonological research, offering high ecological validity (see e.g. Beckman, 1997; Warner, 2012; Tucker & Mukai, 2023 for a discussion on validity). However, compiling corpora and looking for specific phenomena can be time and resource-consuming. In response to this challenge, we developed a program named Pyrlato, which we aim to demonstrate. Pyrlato is a novel tool designed for creating corpora of real-world spoken data from the web. The tool extracts audio files from YouTube, cutting and extracting desired segments such as specific phonemes, syllables, or words found in YouTube videos. This enables the creation of corpora with tens of thousands of tokens within a few computational hours. Pyrlato works across Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese, i.e. those languages for which YouTube provides automatic subtitles. The software searches for the desired string in the subtitles and, upon finding the match, extracts the relevant audio extract containing the string in .mp3 format (other formats are also possible).
The demonstration will showcase Pyrlato's online version and the application of some case studies.
• Beckman, M.E. (1997).A typology of spontaneous speech. In Y. Sagisaka, N. Campbell, & N. Higuchi (Eds.), Computing Prosody: Computational Models for Processing Spontaneous Speech (pp. 7–26). Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_2.
• Tucker, B.V., & Mukai, Y. (2023). Spontaneous speech. Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943024.
• Warner, N. (2012). Methods for studying spontaneous speech. In A. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 621–633). Oxford University Press.
Past events
Event Information:
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Thu09May20192:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)
Philippe Boula de Mareüil (CNRS): "Towards a speaking atlas of dialects and minority languages of Western Europe"
Show contentAbstract:
We will describe a speaking atlas that takes the form of a website presenting interactive maps, where it is possible to click on over 300 survey points to listen to speech samples and read a transcript of what is said, in dialects and minority languages of France, Italy and Belgium. We show how an attractive website enables us to collect more data in underresourced and endangered languages and how these data may be used for phonetic analyses and dialectometry purposes. A one-minute story (“The North Wind and the Sun”) was used, phonetically transcribed automatically by grapheme-to-phoneme converters and forced aligned with the audio signal: a methodology which can be applied to other languages and dialects.