11-736 Seminar on Endangered Languages

Instructors:
Alan W Black, Robert Frederking, Laura Tomokiyo


We are pleased to announce that we are again offering this graduate seminar in Fall 2016. The purpose of this seminar is to allow students to better understand the linguistic, social and political issues when working with language technologies for endangered languages. Often in LTI we concentrate on issues of modeling with small amounts of data, or designing optimal strategies for collecting data, but ignore many of the wider practical issues that appear when working with endangered languages.

This seminar will consist of reading books and papers, and having participants give presentations; a few invited talks (e.g. from field linguists, and language advocates) will also be included. It will count for 6 units of LTI course credit. It may be possible for interested students to also carry out a related 6-unit project as a lab.

Class will be held Tuesdays, 4:30-5:50.
We will meet in GHC6404.

Grade will be based on presentations and class participation.

You can still access the Fall 2015 details webpage.

Please contact AWB, LMT, or REF if interested, or if you have any questions.

Class dates and material covered:
DateMaterialPresenter
08/30/2016Sem on ELs session 1.pptAWB
09/06/2016Crystal Ch. 1 and 5AWB
09/13/2016Orality, Writing systemsREF
09/20/2016 IPA, part 1 and part 2;
Homework 1
Mortensen
09/27/2016 Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages; slides;
Homework 2
LMT
10/04/2016 Student presentations Emily, Arjun
10/11/2016Project discussionAWB
10/18/2016No classNone
10/25/2016 Student presentation; project discussionAll
11/01/2016Speech Processing for Unwritten LanguagesAWB
11/08/2016Mystery Speaker: Malay (village dialect)Mortensen
11/15/2016"Put" videosLMT
11/22/2016Learning from phoneme latticesNeubig
11/29/2016WALSAWB
12/6/2016Student projectsAll