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Résumé de la séance du 23/11/2021 : Repenser ses pratiques numériques : adopter des logiciels et services libres pour une science ouverte

Résumé de la séance du 23/11/2021 : Repenser ses pratiques numériques : adopter des logiciels et services libres pour une science ouverte

Intervention de Balthazar Do Nascimento (CNRS-LaCiTO) et de Mathieu Wostyn (association Globenet)

(La séance n’a pas été filmée ni enregistrée, mais le support de la formation sera bientôt disponible)

Les intervenants ont rappelé que le recours à des logiciels libres concerne tout le monde, pas seulement les informaticiens et des spécialistes des technologie.
Le sujet est vaste, comprend beaucoup d’implications juridiques, politiques et sociales.

Historique
La naissance du logiciel libre est lié au projet GNU développé en 1983 et à son fondateur, Richard Stallman.
Un problème de matériel l’a incité à s’intéresser au sujet des logiciels bloqués par les marques (cas des imprimantes, par exemple).
Stallman était proche des milieux hackers (terme né en 1959, lié au MIT, chez des étudiants qui voulaient connaître le fonctionnement des choses, des réseaux, des ordinateurs).
Essor de l’idée de liberté et de partage.

Les intervenants ont ensuite défini quelques concepts :
a) logiciel libre : garantie de 4 libertés fondamentales, aspect éthique assez fort

b) logiciel propriétaire : code non modifiable; logiciel payant (parfois gratuit)

c) logiciel open source. Domine actuellement.
Ne garantit pas forcément les 4 libertés du logiciel libre, il peut y avoir des restrictions.
Il existe une fondation : Open Source Initiative

d) logiciel graticiel : gratuit non libre
Logiciel propriétaire distribué gratuitement sans toutefois conférer à l’utilisateur certaines libertés d’usage.

De nos jours, beaucoup de logiciels et d’applications liés à internet fonctionnent grâce à des logiciels libres, mais sont hébergés par des entreprises privées qui rajoutent des briques “propriétaires”.

Les intervenants ont ensuite évoqué les licences, avec ou sans copyleft (forme de licence liée à la propriété intellectuelle) ainsi que les “modes” actuelles dans ce domaine (BSD : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_BSD ; MIT : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_MIT).

La séance s’est achevée par un débat avec les participants sur leurs usages et questions au sujet des logiciels qu’ils utilisent.
Si les arguments en faveur du recours aux logiciels libres sont nombreux (formats non propriétaires, possibilité de récupérer les données, coûts),  les freins ne le sont pas moins :
–  formation (il faut apprendre à se servir d’un logiciel qui fonctionne suivant une autre logique, cela peut prendre du temps que l’utilisateur n’arrive pas à trouver) ;
– pérennité moindre de certains logiciels libres (il faut donc changer, réapprendre régulièrement) ;
– ergonomie (certains logiciels sont développés dans l’idée qu’ils fonctionnent différemment de la version payante, ce qui est peu incitatif pour l’utilisateur)…

Dans ce contexte, les associations liées aux logiciels libres peuvent servir de centre d’information et aider au changement des pratiques des usagers.

Speech recognition for newly documented languages: highly encouraging tests using automatically generated phonemic transcription of Yongning Na audio recordings

Automatic speech recognition tools have strong potential for facilitating language documentation. This blog note reports on highly encouraging tests using automatic transcription in the documentation of Yongning Na, a Sino-Tibetan language of Southwest China. After twenty months of fieldwork (spread over twelve years, from 2006 to 2017), 14 hours of speech had been recorded, of which 5.5 hours were transcribed (200 minutes of narratives and 130 minutes of morphotonology elicitation sessions). Oliver Adams, the author of Persephone, an open-source software tool for developing multilingual acoustic models, volunteered to experiment with these data. He trained a single-speaker automatic speech transcription tool over the transcribed materials and applied it to untranscribed audio files. The error rate is low: on the order of 17% of errors in phoneme identification. This makes the automatic transcriptions useful as a canvas for the linguist, who corrects mistakes and produces the translation in collaboration with language consultants.

Today I am posting my initial report to Oliver Adams, written in the field in Yunnan, on May 12th, 2017. I consider this date as a landmark in my work documenting Yongning Na! This document remained confidential until today because its online availability would have de-anonymized a submission that was under double-blind review for a workshop in Australia (the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop, Dec. 6-8, 2017). This paper, which presents Oliver’s work to an audience of language technology specialists, is now available here.
Continuer la lecture de Speech recognition for newly documented languages: highly encouraging tests using automatically generated phonemic transcription of Yongning Na audio recordings

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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“Tone in Yongning Na” now published!

Book cover: Tone in Yongning Na

The volume Tone in Yongning Na is now published.

It is open-access: the book is freely available as a PDF from the publisher’s website.

It is open-source: the LaTeX code is freely available on GitHub (from the same page as the PDF).

Last but not least, the analyses are based on data hosted in an open archive (the Pangloss Collection) that allows free download of original sound files and transcriptions (no login required).

I think I should now let the book speak for itself 🙂 and thank once again the many colleagues who helped all along the way.

One of the aims of this blog post is to spread the word about the publishing house. Publishing a book at Language Science Press was a sparkling experience all along. If you do not know about Language Science Press yet, I strongly encourage you to read the description of the “Motivation”, “Setup” and “Vision” of this wonderfully forward-looking publisher.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Project completed! Looking back at the past 48 months, and forward to online grammars and more connected data

The completion date of the HimalCo project (2013-2016) is the day after tomorrow: December 31st, 2016. It’s a good time to look back at the past 48 months, and forward to more and more connected data: online grammars with one-click links to data, and other improvements for the greater benefit of linguistic research.

The aim of this project was to build several types of corpora (traditional stories and dictionaries) for unwritten and endangered Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and in Tibetan areas of China (Khaling, Thulung, Koyi, Japhug, Zbu, Khroskyabs, Na), as well as to produce tools to analyze and format these corpora. We were able to develop a dictionary interface on the Pangloss collection website (http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/dictionaries/), and an online tool of parallel corpus comparison (http://himalco.huma-num.fr/corpus/comparable/index.htm and  http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/dictionaries/). The Khaling, Thulung, Japhug and Na corpora of the Pangloss collection were also significantly enriched.

The software engineer Céline Buret collaborated with us during 24 months. She developed a python library which implements in XML the lexicographical norm LMF, with conversion tools from the MDF format (used by many fieldwork linguists to make their dictionaries) to LaTeX, HTML and DOC. PDF versions of the dictionaries have been generated using LaTeX, and a paper version of the Khaling dictionary has been derived from it.
Continuer la lecture de Project completed! Looking back at the past 48 months, and forward to online grammars and more connected data

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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“Tone in Yongning Na” is the first book to enter Open Review stage at Language Science Press!

The HimalCo project allowed for the completion of the linguist’s “three treasures” for the Yongning Na language: a dictionary; a collection of texts; and a monograph. This monograph was submitted in June 2016 to Language Science Press.

Language Science Press publishes high quality, peer-reviewed open-access books in linguistics. All publications are free for both authors and readers. General Editors are Stefan Müller (FU Berlin) and Martin Haspelmath (MPI for the Science of Human History). They are supported by a high-profile Advisory Board.

The book, entitled “Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology”, was accepted in October 2016. Anonymous reviewers provided a wealth of comments and suggestions, which were gratefully implemented. Now “Tone in Yongning Na” is the first book to enter Open Review stage at Language Science Press. I hope you will want to have a look!

Two quick notes for readers:
(i) The draft that is currently open for you to review has a few unsightly page breaks and line breaks: for instance, the word “construction” begins at the end of page 144 (“construc-“) and the ending (“tion”) is orphaned on page 147. Some examples are also split over two pages. And a few lines spill into the margins. Please kindly disregard these issues concerning page breaks and line breaks: we’re aware of those, but page breaks and line breaks will only be finalized at the very end of the typesetting stage.
(ii) It seems that the PDF made available on the reviewing interface, PaperHive, is not searchable. It makes it hard to navigate the volume. In case you struggle with this, you can download the (searchable) PDF at the following address:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nekau4g6q91tg6t/109ToneInYongningNa_Draft_21Dec.pdf?dl=0
You can then EITHER provide your comments by logging in to PaperHive and locating the places you have comments about, OR send me comments by e-mail (alexis.michaud@cnrs.fr). All comments will be gratefully acknowledged whether transmitted through PaperHive or by e-mail.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Nepal News

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Like anyone with a strong attachment to Nepal–and many more besides–we were heartbroken to witness from afar the two major earthquakes which devastated Nepal on April 25th and May 12th. Thankfully, the individuals we work with most closely have all reported that they are safe. While there was serious damage in Solu district, where the Rai languages are spoken, it seems that the number of casualties was not as high as was initially feared.
The French government is for the time being not allowing French civil servants (a status covering French academics) to travel to Nepal. As a result, we are working to bring a Thulung speaker to Paris during the summer, which will allow us to continue to work on these amazing languages while giving Nepal time to recover from its wounds.  We still hope to return to Nepal in the fall–Nepal has expressed that the best way to help is to travel to the country, as it relies so much on tourism–and will find ways to spread the word about these languages either way.

Project currently developing on GitHub — out of public view

The project blog has gone quiet in the past 5 months, as texts and dictionaries are in the making in a (nonpublic) GitHub repository. Tools for data migration from Toolbox / MDF format to XML and LaTEX are now operational. Painstakingly collected linguistic data and innovative technology make a heady cocktail: we were excited to see the very earliest professional-looking draft versions of our dictionaries.

Aimée Lahaussois made a field trip to Nepal earlier this year; Guillaume Jacques is beginning one in Southwest China; and this post’s author will visit again Yongning (also in Southwest China) in August. Lots of tasks are under way. In GitHub jargon: hundreds of ‘Commits’ (updates of documents and scripts), 9 Wiki pages, (currently) 33 ‘Issues’ (tasks to be done)… and high hopes of having great things to showcase here in due course.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Third Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Sichuan: a brief report

Last month our team organised the third edition of the Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Sichuan, which followed a first workshop in Taipei organised by Jackson T.-S. Sun, and a second one in Beijing in 2010. The conference was hosted at the EHESS.

Alexis Michaud set up a lively website for the workshop. A Book of abstracts is available.

Nearly all fields of linguistics were represented during this conference, and the proportion of papers on phonology and phonetics vs. morphosyntax was relatively well balanced.

It may be unappropriate for me, as one of the co-organizers, to praise the success of our workshop. Yet, I think that it was noteworthy in at least one respect. The advantage of small-scale workshops like this one is that people working on closely related research topics can get together and interact with each other in a better way than in huge conferences. In this workshop, we established a record for the number of presentations on Naish (four) and Rgyalrongic (eight). The presentations on these languages also happened, for some of them at least, to be on related topics: all papers on Naish were about tonology, in particular. This allowed detailed and productive discussions both during the question sessions and during breaks, and it was quite a rewarding experience — at least for me.

Among the participants at the conference were three native speakers of the languages under investigation: Wang Shuangcheng (speaker of Amdo Tibetan and dialectologist himself), Skalbzang Phuntshogs (whose name is sinicized as Geiru Pincuo, a speaker of Northern Pumi collaborating with Henriette Daudey on language documentation) and bLobzang Nyima (a speaker of Rtau [rəsɲəske] who lives in Paris and collaborates with our team). Their presence was in my opinion an essential element of the success of this workshop: during discussions, it allowed for immediate reverification of data cited by participants. It is already a tradition, since 2008, for the Sichuan Workshop to include native speaker participants, and I hope that this tradition will continue in further instalments of this conference.

Zev Handel has expressed his interest to organize the next workshop in Seattle, and I look forward to it already.

Victor Segalen: an explorer who gave a bad name to foreign scholars in China

A Chinese friend doing archaeological work once asked me, ‘Have you heard about Victor Segalen?’ (謝閣蘭) And then, ‘What do you think about him?’

Before our discussion, my impression was positive. I liked Segalen’s literary works; and I believed that Segalen was equally serious about exploring China. Unlike others, he learnt some Chinese; and he went to faraway places, (re-)discovering major archaeological sites. His style of writing is decidedly on the romantic, passionate side, lacking the kind of matter-of-fact information that is required for serious scholarship, but poetic licence seemed OK on the part of an explorer from the last years of Imperial China. There are some obnoxious colonial overtones in some of his writings, but that too seemed OK if viewed in the context of his time.

My Chinese friend’s perception was different. As an archaeologist, he pointed out that Segalen had unearthed sculptures, taken pictures, and gone his own sweet way, leaving ancient art objects exposed to the elements and to depredation, without even reporting their location in sufficient detail. That was an eye-opener for me. Inspired literary works cannot serve as an excuse for leaving a mess behind. As an archaeologist, Victor Segalen simply did not do a serious job. When in a foreign country, one is seen, willy-nilly, as a representative of one’s own country; and so Segalen gave a bad name to foreign scholars in China.

The morality for linguists is simple. When we go and collect data, beyond our immediate interests it’s important to think in terms of stable repositories that guarantee long-term conservation and online availability for researchers and for the communities.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Talking dictionaries for Himalayan languages

In addition to parallel corpora, the main objective of this research project (HimalCo) is to create a set of online talking dictionaries, in particular from Japhug Rgyalrong, Khaling, Thulung and Yongning Na. We are still weighing our options concerning the structure of the platform (in particular, whether or not to use LexiquePro), but we have decided that all dictionaries will be encoded in a Toolbox-like format, either directly generated by Toolbox itself or exported from FLEX.

Files in Toolbox format are easily manipulable with PERL scripts. They can be easily converted to HTML and combined with sound files to produce a simple interface for web dictionaries, like the Arapaho talking dictionary (this could be an alternative to LexiquePro):

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~arapaho/arapaho_english.html

It is also easily convertible to LaTeX code, which can then compiled into a PDF file to produce a professionally typeset version of the dictionary with hyperlinks for cross-references. We place special focus on online tools, and on the web version of dictionaries, but it is also necessary to have printed versions accessible to the speakers of the languages.

Also, it is trivial to write PERL script to convert from one writing system to another (for instance, from IPA to Devanagari script in the case of languages of Nepal) and to automatically generate entire paradigms for either the complex verbal flexion of the Kiranti languages or the intricate tonal alternations of the Naish languages.

Within the three years time frame of this project, it would be irrealistic to work on lots of dictionaries at the same time. For this reason, we decided, in the case of the three Kiranti languages under study, to compile verb dictionaries only. These dictionaries will comprise all the verb roots, their derived forms, example sentences, and a complete list of automatically generated paradigms. This is also a better service to the communities, as many Rai (Kiranti ) intellectuals attempt at making dictionaries themselves, but experience diffculty with the complex verbal morphology of their languages.

I have finished a first draft of the Khaling verb dictionary (the example sentences were collected during my field trip in Solukhumbu last February), and I am bringing it to Nepal next week for proofreading, finishing the section on complex predicates and recording the examples for the web version. This dictionary will continue to improve over the years; on the other hand, a first publishable version is now in view, and I hope that it can soon be made available to native speakers as a practical, easy-to-use book.

On the notion of parallel corpora

We borrowed this idea from the field of translation studies, where translation equivalents are aligned and then stored as translation memory to be used during later translation tasks.  What interested us was the idea of aligning linguistic data across languages and retrieving aligned segments for the purposes of analysis and comparison.

One of the remarkable features of Kiranti languages in Eastern Nepal is that their mythology is surprisingly similar: in some cases, perfect calques of sentences are found across different language versions of a same story.  This seemed like a good starting point for building a corpus of aligned material based on resolutely native data, as opposed to more artificial (but still interesting) material such as Frog stories and Pear Stories.

We have set up a prototype for the aligntment of stories, and so far, it is quite promising:  we have aligned three different versions of the story of Kakcilip–in Thulung, Koyi and Khaling–in such a way that similar content across languages is tagged with a Similarity label.

The Similarity labels appear above the sentence numbers in the full-text versions of the story in the different languages. When a sentence with such a label is selected, it leads to a view of that same sentence in the languages involved in the similarity.

We had, of course, to define the notion of similarity for the purposes of this alignment: for the time being, our working definition is that it concerns a segment of text of similar narrative function or content.  This allows us to align, in addition to material sharing lexical and morphosyntactic features, sentences in different versions that outwardly have no connection (different names of protagonists, different actions, different objects involved) but that share narrative function, in being, for example, a turning point within the story.

The ability to see the same (or a similar) sentence across languages makes it possible to identify the individual languages’ available tools for expressing similar material.

We have also associated a concordancer with the aligned corpus, which means that we can look for specific morphemes or lexemes and then compare them across languages.

For more details on the technical set-up, you can see our paper presented at LREC 2012, in a workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora.

About Exploratory Field Trips

These days, the project team is busy finalizing administrative issues. One slight difficulty is that the funding agency, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, does not have a separate category for exploratory field trips: trips to the areas where the languages we study are spoken, and where we collect the data which is then organized, made available online (in the Pangloss Collection) and analyzed. In the budget documents, they are pooled together with the budget items for attending conferences, workshops… As a result, linguistics project with a fieldwork component look pretty strange from the point of view of current administrative/accounting standards. It looks as if too much money were spent on international travel.

This administrative episode gives us an opportunity to emphasize the specificity of exploratory field trips, which are central to our work. Fortunately, the people at ANR are open to suggestions and interested in understanding how our work is actually conducted, so the odds are that we shall be able to carry out numerous field trips, as originally planned. Who knows–perhaps exploratory field trips will even come to be recognized as a special category of “mission” in administrative typology? At some research centres with a strong tradition of fieldwork, such as LACITO, the two (“Conferences/Workshops” and “Fieldwork”) are already distinguished, as a matter of course.

 

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

More Posts - Website

HimalCo – Himalayan Corpora

This project proposes to build parallel corpora for three sub-groups of the Sino-Tibetan family, covering a total of 8 little-described oral languages. These corpora will be made up of texts and lexical data. Texts that share a similar (sometimes nearly identical) narrative frame will be selected, drawing from the strong mythological traditions of the Greater Himalayan region. One set of parallel texts will be assembled for each sub-group: Kiranti (from Nepal), and Rgyalrong and Naish (from China). (Note that “parallel texts” in the sense of our project does not refer to texts with aligned translation, as in “parallel Classical Greek texts”: Greek on one page and English on the facing page, but to traditional texts put in parallel according to the junctures of their narrative frames.) The alignment of texts on the basis of their narrative frame will allow for the cross-language comparison of highly similar native materials; among other benefits for research, the typologically salient features of each sub-group will thus come to the fore with greater accuracy than can be obtained through the type of elicitation often used for cross-language comparison, e.g. the Pear Story.
HimalCo includes the two essential steps of (i) first-hand data collection in the field (in Nepal and China) and (ii) state-of-the-art transcription, annotation and formatting of the entire data set. In addition to classical interlinear morphemic glossing, translation and sound synchronization as implemented in the LACITO Archive (to which the participants are regular contributors), the narratives will be organized into parallel corpora in each of the three language subgroups, and the lexical data will be serve as the basis for talking dictionaries: dictionaries combined with sound recordings of individual entries (words spoken in isolation) and of example sentences.
The team, which includes an IT specialist, will develop simple interfaces for the consultation of parallel corpora and talking dictionaries, allowing the comparison of material in individual languages, across languages of a subgroup, and across subgroups. This project will provide the solid empirical basis which has heretofore been lacking for research on these languages: all the materials will be made freely available online through the LACITO Archive, whose interface will be enriched to allow consultation of parallel texts and talking dictionaries. These objectively verifiable data will be available for the in-depth investigation of a broad range of issues that include topical issues in synchrony and diachrony (comparative morphology; reconstruction of Tibeto-Burman morphology; and study of the evolution of morphological systems) for which these languages have key evidence to contribute.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

More Posts - Website