Normalising Audio Transcriptions for Unwritten Languages
Adel Foda, Steven Bird · 2011
The task of documenting the world’s lan-guages is a mainstream activity in linguis-tics which is yet to spill over into computa-tional linguistics. We propose a new task of transcription normalisation as an algo-rithmic method for speeding up the pro-cess of transcribing audio sources, leading to text collections of usable quality. We report on the application of sentence and word alignment algorithms to this task, before describing a new algorithm. All of the algorithms are evaluated over syn-thetic datasets. Although the results are nuanced, the transcription normalisation task is suggested as an NLP contribution to the grand challenge of documenting the world’s languages. 1