Abstract
This paper describes Phon, an open-source software program for the transcription, coding, and analysis of phonetically-transcribed speech corpora. Phon provides support for multimedia data linkage, utterance segmentation, multiple-blind transcription, transcription validation, syllabification, and alignment of target and actual forms. All functions are available through a user-friendly graphical interface. This program provides the basis for the building of PhonBank, a database project that seeks to broaden the scope of CHILDES into phonological development and disorders.
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Notes
- 1.
Support for the Unix/Linux platform is currently compromised, primarily because of licensing issues related to the multimedia functions of the application.
- 2.
Previous experience in computational molecular biology and data mining suggests that, given the large amounts of data involved, various specialized algorithmic techniques will probably have to be invoked to allow time-series pattern matching to run in practical amounts of time and computer memory. The typical approach described in [11] is to simplify the given data, derive approximate analysis-results relative to this simplified data, and (hopefully with minimal effort) reconstruct exact analysis-results relative to the original data. However, there may be other options, such as using so-called fixed-parameter tractable algorithms [4, 16] whose running times are impractical in general but efficient under the restrictions present in learner time-series datasets.
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Acknowledgements
We would like thank the co-organisers of the original ACL workshop (namely, Afra Alishahi, Thierry Poibeau, Anna Korhonen and Aline Villavicencio) for their help and support through all the steps that brought us to this publication and Carla Peddle for assistance in preparing the final version presented here. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback. Current development of Phon and PhonBank is supported by the National Institute of Health. Earlier development of Phon was funded by grants from National Science Foundation, Canada Fund for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Petro-Canada Fund for Young Innovators, and the Office of the Vice-President (Research) and the Faculty of Arts at Memorial University of Newfoundland. TW would also like to acknowledge support provided through NSERC Discovery Grant 228104.
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Rose, Y., Hedlund, G.J., Byrne, R., Wareham, T., MacWhinney, B. (2013). Phon: A Computational Basis for Phonological Database Building and Model Testing. In: Villavicencio, A., Poibeau, T., Korhonen, A., Alishahi, A. (eds) Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31863-4_2
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