Previous Work: Preserving Unwritten Languages

In this project, researchers at ICSI are collaborating with Notre Dame to preserve unwritten languages in danger of disappearing. They are recording speech in a variety of genres and styles using mobile technologies. To enable productive linguistic and language-technology research in the future, they are adding respeaking, in which native speakers listen and repeat each phrase slowly and carefully, as well as oral translation, in which bilingual speakers of the language translate the recordings phrase by phrase into a widely used language such as English. The ICSI researchers are focused on app development and testing, along with experiments in data collection.