Sam Passmore, Lila San Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, Saurabh Nath, Kira Davey, Keira Mullan, Tim Cawley, Jennifer Biggs, Rosey Billington, Bethwyn Evans, Nick Thieberger, Danielle Barth. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

For most of the world’s languages, detailed phonetic analyses across different aspects of the sound system do not exist, due in part to limitations in available speech data and tools for efficiently processing such data for low-resource languages. Archival language documentation collections offer opportunities to extend the scope and scale of phonetic research on low-resource languages, and developments in methods for automatic recognition and alignment of speech facilitate the preparation of phonetic corpora based on these collections. We present a case study applying speech modelling and forced alignment methods to narrative data for Nafsan, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu. We examine the accuracy of the forced-aligned phonetic labelling based on limited speech data used in the modelling process, and compare acoustic and durational measures of 17,851 vowel tokens for 11 speakers with previous experimental phonetic data for Nafsan. Results point to the suitability of archival data for large-scale studies of phonetic variation in low-resource languages, and also suggest that this approach can feasibly be used as a starting point in expanding to phonetic comparisons across closely-related Oceanic languages.

Glossopticon is a Virtual Reality (VR)-based information visualisation system that presents heritage audio recordings in the archival linguistic data of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) collection. This paper will outline the project, the way it has used VR to visualise information and how it has been used on multiple levels-from public exhibition piece, to research tool-and in doing so provides an exemplar of the notion of the collaborative, interdisciplinary project as a basic unit of scholarly investigation within the digital humanities.