AAM-LR: Automatic Annotation of Multi-modal Language Resources

The AAM-LR web service helps researchers to annotate audio and video recordings. At the top level the service marks the time intervals at which specific persons in the recording are speaking. In addition, the service provides a global phonetic annotation, using language independent phone models and phonetic features. Speech is separated from speaker noises such as laughing. The output of the web service is fed into the ELAN/ANNEX editor, to facilitate further manual annotation. The annotations conform to ISOCat and potential new categories were added to ISOCat.

Analyzing large amounts of field work recordings is prohibitively time consuming and expensive. As a consequence, there is a rapidly growing pile of data that does exist, but that is practically impossible to use. It is estimated that by the year 2020 more than 90% of the field work recordings will be sitting unused in archives, unless automatic tools for annotating the data can be made available. Given the cost of the field work and making the recordings in the first place, the lack of efficient tools for processing the data is especially awkward. While the AAM-LR tool will not provide fully automatic analysis of the field work corpora, they will certainly reduce the time needed for making linguistic analysis by several orders of magnitude, thereby bringing effective usage of the data within the realm of what is feasible. Thus, the AAM-LR tools will not help with respect to a specific research question, but they will improve the working environment for linguists working in areas of language contact, language typology, language and cognition and many other sub-disciplines. The AAM-LR tools will also make fieldwork recordings accessible for other types of humanities research. [site:mail]

  • Project leader:  Em. prof. dr. Lou Boves (Radboud University)
  • CLARIN center : Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
  • Help contact : http://tla.mpi.nl/contact/

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