LINGUIST List 4.15

Thu 15 Jan 1993

Qs: Pedagogical Material, Dictionaries

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Vicki Fromkin, (COPY) for american academics
2. FI0CN1F, Pedagogical materials for Caribbean creoles
3. Yeshwant K Muthusamy, WANTED: On-line Pronunciation Dictionaries

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the association which
works to establish standards for sound academic practice, has voted to
establish a committee which is charged with reviewing its policies so that the
concerns of gay, lesbian, and bisexual academics are included in a more direct
and meaningful way. This review is aimed at establishing guidelines which
would operate to create a more comfortable environment for gay, lesbian, and
bisexual academics. As a member of this committee, I would like to ask that
interested individuals send me suggestions of specific policies that should be
in place or for indications of problems that have been encountered by glb
faculty members or graduate students which could be addressed by the
development of appropriate policies. These communications may be sent to me
at: JPERLEYACS.WOOSTER.EDU

Please forward this request to any all appropriate lists that you may know of.
Sincerely,
Jim Perley
JPERLEYACS.WOOSTER.EDU

 As Harry Howard mentioned in a query sent out in December,
Tulane University is setting up a pilot project to offer five
Less Commonly Taught Languages (or, perhaps more precisely, five
languages which Tulane does not currently teach). I have been
asked to research the pedagogical materials available for the
French-based creoles of the Caribbean, in particular those of
Haiti and Martinique. I am familair with the materials put out by the
Creole Institute at Indiana University, but would be very grateful
for information about additional resources. Specifically, I would
appreciate (1) suggestions on materials for classroom and/or
informant-assisted instruction, and (2) suggestions on assessment
which would satisfy customary accreditation standards, e.g. is there
anyone out there who could test our students in these languages?
Please reply to me personally. Thank you very much.

Tom Klingler
Dept. of French and Italian
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA 70118

FI0CN1FMUSIC.TCS.TULANE.EDU

The Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Graduate
Institute is looking for on-line pronunciation dictionaries (with
lexical stress marks) in the following languages:

 French Russian
 German Polish
 Japanese Czech
 Korean Portuguese
 Vietnamese Swedish
 Farsi Swahili
 Spanish Malay
 Tamil Hungarian
 Mandarin Italian
 Hindi Eastern Arabic (from Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Kuwait and
 Saudi Arabia only)

We need these dictionaries to aid in the automatic phonetic labeling
of speech and the development of phonetic classifier(s) for each of
these languages. We are in the process of collecting and developing a
corpus of speech (recorded over commercial telephone lines) in each of
the above languages. So far, we have at least 100 calls in each of the 10
languages in the first column (and English). The corpus contains a mix
of fixed-vocabulary and spontaneous speech utterances.

Our objective is to provide fine-phonetic transcriptions to some or all
of the utterances in the corpus. The dictionaries are an essential
part of this semi-automatic transcription task. The transcriptions
will then be used to train multi-language fine-phonetic classifiers.
This project is part of our ongoing research in automatic language
identification using telephone speech.

We intend to distribute the completed phonetic transcriptions along
with the speech data to not-for-profit organizations for a nominal
charge.

We would appreciate any information on obtaining these dictionaries.
Please respond via e-mail to yeshwantcse.ogi.edu, or call Yeshwant
Muthusamy at (503) 690-1431.

Thanks in advance,

Yeshwant

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Yeshwant Muthusamy Phone: (503) 690-1431
Center for Spoken Language Understanding Fax: (503) 690-1334
Oregon Graduate Institute
19600 NW Von Neumann Drive
Beaverton OR 97006-1999
USA
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