Events

Upcoming events

Event Information:

  • Thu
    13
    Jun
    2024

    Giuseppe Magistro (UGent) - "Creating a corpus of web-data with Pyrlato. A demonstration"

    2:00 pmLokaal 3.30 - Camelot, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren

    The 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.

     

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Past events

Event Information:

  • Tue
    29
    Nov
    2016

    Linguistic and Cultural Education in Western Christianity (c.380–735): A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals

    5:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)

    Tim Denecker: Linguistic and Cultural Education in Western Christianity (c.380–735): A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals

    My postdoctoral research project aims to improve our understanding of the linguistic and cultural foundations for education in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. In order to do so, it focuses on the corpus of Latin language manuals (grammatical, lexicographical and orthographical works) produced during the period between the manuals of Augustine (c.380) and Bede (d. 735). The project is based on the hypothesis that manuals play a key role in shaping a body of general and propaedeutic knowledge for a particular historical period, and that the language manuals at hand can accordingly be approached as major sources in assessing the status and level of linguistic and cultural knowledge in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. More specifically, my research project investigates (1) the conceptual basis and structure of the language manuals in their relation to earlier (pagan and Christian) representatives in the tradition; (2) the formal organization of the linguistic and cultural knowledge the manuals transmit, from the perspective of special language studies (Fachtexte/Fachsprachen); and (3) the manuals’ insertion in their sociocultural context: whom do they teach and in which linguistic and sociocultural circumstances? From the perspective of historical sociolinguistics, the project looks in particular at the attitudes the manuals exhibit towards (a) the evolution of ‘Classical’ to ‘Late’ Latin, and (b) the bi- and multilingual settings in which they were conceived and used. In my presentation, I will deal in some more detail with my corpus, method and research questions, and illustrate all this by means of some first results.

     

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