Programme

Friday, August 18th, 2023

09:00-09:10 Opening Session

  • 09:00-09:05 SIGUL 2023 Opening Talk
    • SIGUL Co-Chair: Maite Melero
  • 09:05-09:10 Welcome Speech
    • Local Organizer: Ailbhe Ní Chasaide

09:10-10:00 Keynote Speech (Chair: Maite Melero)

  • Reclaiming Our Voices: Imagining Community-Led Ai/Ml Practices
    • Subhashish Panigrahi

10:00-10:40 SIGUL Session 1: NLP (Chair: Mélanie Jouitteau)

  • 10:00-10:20 (on-site) [Lg: Romanian (Romania)]
    • Short-Cutting Manual Acquisition in Deep-Learning Deciphering of Old Documents (paper | slides)
      • D. Cristea
  • 10:20-10:40 (on-site) [Lg: Saraiki (Pakistan)]
    • A Finite-State Morphological Analyzer for Saraiki (paper | slides)
      • M. Alam, A. O’Neil, D.G. Swanson and F.M. Tyers

10:40-11:10 Coffee Break

11:10-12:30 SIGUL Session 2: Resources, Pronunciation & Dialect (Chair: Alex Cristia)

  • 11:10-11:30 (remote) [Lg: 6 Tibeto-Burman and 4 Indo-Aryan (India)]
    • Collecting Speech Data for Endangered and Under-resourced Indian Languages (paper | slides)
      • R. Kumar, M. Takhellambam, A. Gope, B Lahiri, S. Ratan, N. Mathur, S. Singh
  • 11:30-11:50 (remote) [Lg: Kanak (New Caledonia)]
    • A visit to the Cliffs of Jokin: A role for phonetizers in second language pronunciation and word learning, with an example from the under-resourced languages of New Caledonia (paper | slides) 
      • P. Welby, B. Bigi, A. Corral, F. Wacalie, G. Wattelez
  • 11:50-12:10 (on-site) [Lg: Korebaju (Colombian)]
    • An intra- and inter-dialectal study of Korebaju vowels  (paper | slides)
      • J.V. Rodríguez, N. Vallee, T. Chacon, C. Savariaux, S. Gerber
  • 12:10-12:30 (on-site) [Lg: Nepali, Lyngam, Na-nasu, War, Na (Nepal/Tibet)]
    • From ‘Snippet-lects’ to Doculects and Dialects: Leveraging Neural Representations of Speech for Placing Audio Signals in a Language Landscape (paper | slides)
      • S. Guillaume, G. Wisniewski, A. Michaud

12:30-13:30 Lunch Break

13:30-14:30 SIGUL Poster Session (Chair: Satoshi Tamura)

  • (remote) [Lg: Konkani (Indo-Aryan)]
    • Konkani Integer Phonetic Transcription System (paper | poster)
      • S. Fadte, E.V. Fernades, H.H. Redkar, T. Kundaikar, R. Karmali, J.D. Pawar
  • (on-site) [Lg: Maltese – Semitic (Sicilian Arabic)]
    • The Applicability of Wav2Vec2 and Whisper for Low-Resource Maltese ASR (paper | poster)
      • A. Williams, A.D. Marco, C. Borg
  • (on-site) [Lg: North Sami (Finland)]
    • Speech recognition system improvements for North Sámi Speaker-dependent and Speaker Independent tasks (paper | poster)
      • A. Rouhe, M. Kurimo
  • (on-site) [Lg: Lule and North Sami (Finland)]
    • Developing TTS and ASR for Lule and North Sami languages (paper | poster)
      • K. Hiovain-Asikainen and J.D. Rosa
  • (on-site) [Lg: English-Japanese (Japan)]
    • VGSAlign: Bilingual Speech Alignment of Unpaired and Untranscribed Languages using Self-Supervised Visually Grounded Speech Models (paper | poster)
      • L.T. Nguyen, S. Sakti

14:30-16:10 SIGUL Session 3: Language Technologies 1 (Chair: Dewi Jones)

  • 14:30-14:50 (on-site) [Lg: Hungarian (Hungary) ]
    • What kind of multi- or cross-lingual pre-training is the most effective for a spontaneous, less-resourced ASR task? (paper | slides) 
      • P. Mihajlik, M.S. Kadar, G. Dobsinszki, Y. Meng, M. Kedalai, J. Linke, T. Fegyó, K. Mády
  • 14:50-15:10 (on-site) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland) ]
    • Towards spoken dialect identification of Irish (paper | slides)
      • L. Lonergan, M. Qian, N. Ní Chiaráin, C. Gobl, A. Ní Chasaide
  • 15:10-15:30 (on-site) [Lg: Austrian-German (Austria)]
    • Neural Speech Synthesis for Austrian Dialects with Standard German Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion and Dialect Embeddings (paper | slides)
      • L. Gutscher, M. Pucher, V. Garcia
  • 15:30-15:50 (remote) [Lg: Nepali (Nepal)]
    • Nepali Text-to-Speech Synthesis using Tacotron2 for Mel-spectrogram Generation (paper | slides)
      • S. Khadka, R. GC, P. Paudel, R. Shah, B. Joshi
  • 15:50-16:10 (remote) [Lg: English-Japanese (Japan)]
    • Low-Resource Japanese-English Speech-to-Text Translation Leveraging Speech-Text Unified-model Representation Learning (paper | slides)
      • T. Tran, S. Sakti

16:10-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30-17:30 SIGUL Session 4: Language Technologies 2 (Chair: Alexis Michaud)

  • 16:30-16:50 (on-site) [Lg: 25 Languages (Babel data)]
    • Multilingual models with language embeddings for low-resource speech recognition (paper | slides)
      • L.-M. Lam-Yee-Mui, W.B. Kheder, V.B. Le, C. Barras, J.-L. Gauvain
  • 16:50-17:10 (on-site) [Lg: Bambara (Mali)]
    • Low-resource ASR-free keyword spotting using listen-and-confirm (paper | slides)
      • E. Westhuizen, M. Ribeiro, J.J. Vüren, P. Hidalgo-Sanchis, T. Niesler
  • 17:10-17:30 (remote) [Lg: isiXhosa (South Africa)]
    • Automatic transcription and (de)standardisation (paper | slides)
      • N. Markl, E. Wallington, O. Klejch, T. Reitmaier, G. Bailey, J. Pearson, S. Robinson, M. Jones, P. Bell

17:30-18:15 SIGUL Discussion with Panel (Chair: Sakriani Sakti)

Saturday, August 19th, 2023

9:00-10:40 Special Session on Celtic Languages: Paper Presentation (Chair: Fransen Theodorus)

  • 09:00-09:20 (on-site) [Lg: Breton – Celtic (Britanny)]
    • Community internally driven corpus buildings: Three examples from the Breton ecosystem (paper | slides)
      • M. Jouitteau
  • 09:20-09:40 (on-site) [Lg: Scottish Gaelic – Celtic (Scotland)]
    • A Transformer-Based Orthographic Standardiser for Scottish Gaelic (paper | slides)
      • J. Huang, B. Alex, M. Bauer, D.S. Jasin, Y. Liang, R. Thomas, W. Lamb
  • 09:40-10:00 (on-site) [Lg: Welsh – Celtic (Wales)]
    • Developing Live Welsh Speech Recognition Models for a Commercial Product – a case study (paper | slides)
      • P. Vangberg, L.S. Farhat, D. Jones, S. Kinahan
  • 10:00-10:20 (on-site) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland)]
    • The language communities as active partners in technology provisions: the Irish ABAIR experience (paper | slides)
      • A. Ní Chasaide, N. Ní Chiaráin, H. Berthelsen, A. Murphy, L. Lonergan, J. Sloan, C. Wendler, C. McCabe, E. Barnes, C. Gobl
  • 10:20-10:40 (on-site) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland) ]
    • ABAIR & ÉIST: A demonstration of speech technologies for Irish (paper | slides)
      • A. Murphy, L. Lonergan, M. Qian, H. Berthelsen, C. Wendler, N. Ní Chiaráin, A. Ní Chasaide, C. Gobl

10:40-11:10 Coffee Break

11:10-12:00 Special Session on Celtic Languages: Keynote Speech (Chair: Maite Melero)

  • New Challenges, Old Problems: AI and Under-resourced Languages
    • Delyth Prys

12:00-12:45 Special Session on Celtic Languages: Discussion with Panel (Chair: Delyth Prys & Sakriani Sakti)

  • Role of Local Communities & Policy/Support
    • Panelists
      • Mélanie Jouitteau (Rep. Breton-Britanny; author paper ID#16) — on-site
      • Will Lamb (Rep. Scottish Gaelic – Scotland; author paper ID#7) — on-site
      • Dewi Jones (Rep. Welsh-Wales; author paper ID#11) — on-site
      • Ailbhe Ní Chasaide (Rep. Irish – Ireland; author paper ID#26) — on-site
      • Eoin Ó Droighneáin (Digital plan for the Irish Language – Dept. of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport & Media) — on-site
      • Apolonia Tamata (Rep. from other local community – Fiji Island) — remote
      • Bhuvana Ramabahdran (IEEE Education and outreach activity: Language of the Worlds) — remote
      • Eva Hachem (UNESCO for IDIL Program) – remote

12:45-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00-15:40 Joint SIGUL-SLaTE Session: Paper Presentation 1 (Chair: Ahmed Ali)

  • 14:00-14:20 (on-site SLaTE) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland)]
    • Mol an Óige: a phonological awareness and early literacy platform for Irish
      • A. Ní Chasaide, E. Barnes, R. Errity, O. Mroz, O. Ní hAonghusa, S. Ní Chasaide, A. Giovannini, N. Ní Chiaráin
  • 14:20-14:40 (on-site SLaTE)  [Lg: Finnish and Finland Swedish (Finland)]
    • New data, benchmark and baseline for L2 speaking assessment for low-resource languages
      • M. Kurimo, Y. Getman, E. Voskoboinik, R. Al-Ghezi, H. Kallio, M. Kuronen, A. Zansen, R. Hilden, S. Kronholm, A. Huhta, K. Linden
  • 14:40-15:00 (on-site SIGUL) [Lg: Māori (New Zealand)]
    • Towards Automatic Marking of Pepeha: a Formulaic Māori Language Speech (paper | slides)
      • C. Watson, P. Allen, P. Keegan, K. Mahelona, P.-L. Jones
  • 15:00-15:20 (on-site SIGUL) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland)]
    • Geabaire, the first Irish AAC system: voice as a vehicle for change (paper | slides)
      • E. Barnes, J. Cummins, R. Errity, O. Morrin, H. Berthelsen, C. Wendler, H. Husca, N. Ni Chiaráin and A. Ní Chasaide

15:20-15:50 Coffee Break

15:50-16:50 Joint SIGUL-SLaTE Session: Paper Presentation 2 (Chair: Mark Gales)

  • 15:50-16:10 (on-site SLaTE) [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland)]
    • An Bat M ́ırialta: Stateful Development of an Irregular Verb Bot for Irish
      • J. Sloan, N. Ní Chiaráin
  • 16:10-16:30 (on-site SLaTE)  [Lg: Irish – Celtic (Ireland)]
    • Filling the SLaTE: examining the contribution LLMs can make to Irish iCALL content generation
      • N. Ní Chiaráin, N.R. Gunning, O. Nolan, M. Comtois
  • 16:30-16:50 (on-site SLaTE) [Lg: 21 languages]
    • ChatGPT + LARA = C-LARA
      • B. Bedi, B. Chiera, C. Chua, N. Ní Chiaráin, M. Rayner, A. Simonson, R. Zviel-Girshin

16:50-17:35 Joint SIGUL-SLaTE Session: Discussion with Panel (Chair: Helmer Strik & Sakriani Sakti)

  • Indigenous Language Revitalization through Education & Language Learning Technology
    • Panelists
      • Mikko Kurimo (Author paper SLaTE2) — on-site
      • Catherine Watson (Author paper ID#27) — on-site
      • Emily Barnes (Author paper ID#20) — on-site
      • Nease Ní Chiaráin (Author paper SLaTE3, SLaTE4, SLaTE5) — on-site
      • Catia Cucchiarini (Nederlandse Taalunie [Dutch Language Union]) — on-site
      • Trond Trosterud (The Arctic University of Norway) — remote
      • Alex Cristia (Free Online School on Language Acquisition) — on-site
      • Lorna Williams (Lil’wat from the St’at’yem’c First Nation; “How Universities Can Support Indigenous Language Revitalization and Maintenance“) — remote

17:35-17:45 Closing and Group Photos 

  • 17:35-17:40 SIGUL 2023 Closing Talk
    • SIGUL Co-Chair: Sakriani Sakti
  • 17:40-17:45 SLaTE 2023 Closing Talk
    • SLaTE Co-Chair: Helmer Strik
  • 17:45-18:00 Group Photos