The project SPPAS on Cantonese, led by Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung was granted by Procore in 2015.
We are delighted to announce that the Procore Grant is renewed for 2016.
Congratulations to Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung.
The project SPPAS on Cantonese, led by Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung was granted by Procore in 2015.
We are delighted to announce that the Procore Grant is renewed for 2016.
Congratulations to Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung.
The 4th Variamu workshop will be held at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, on January 6th and 7th, 2015.
Here is the programme:
The First Day (Jan. 6th, 2016) | |||||
8.30-8.45 | Registration | Venue: GH803 | |||
8.45-9.00 | Opening Ceremony | Venue: GH803 | |||
09.00-09.50 | Keynote Speech | William S-Y Wang
Language in Diachrony |
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Themes | Talks | ||||
09.50-10.45 | How to compare languages | Philippe Blache
Computational Typology: How to Compare Languages from Treebanks |
Chu-Ren Huang
Endurant vs. Perduant: An Ontological View of How Variations are Linguistically Conventionalized |
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10.45-11.05 | Tea Break | ||||
11.05-12.00 | From party games to language resources | Laurent Prévot
Quantitative Linguistics of Social Interactions |
Yao Yao
Conversations in Party Games |
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12.00-12.55 | Distributional semantics | Emanuele Chersoni
Dependency-based Modeling of Joint-context in Distributional Similarity |
Enrico Santus, Qin Lu, Alessandro Lenci, and Chu-Ren Huang
Not All Contexts are Equal: Automatic Detection of Antonyms, Hyponyms, Co-hyponyms, and Synonyms in Distributional Semantic Model |
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12.55-14.25 | Lunch Break | ||||
14.25-15.20 | Social variations | Julie Abbou
Sounding Like You? What For? Linguistic Accommodation at the Crossroad of Individual Agency, Norms and Social Categories |
Sophia Y. M. Lee
Emotion and Code-switching
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15.20-16.35 | Dysarthria | Serge Pinto
Dysarthria : Presentation of the French – Portuguese data |
Vivian Lee,Karen Yiu, Jasmin Sadat, Serge Pinto, Iris Lam and Angel Chan
Speech Characteristics of Cantonese Patients with Parkinson’s Disease |
Dustin Lau
Phonology-to- Orthography Conversions in Chinese: Evidence from a dysgraphic patient |
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16.35-16.55 | Tea Break | ||||
16.55-17.55 | Internal Discussion on Collaboration Possibilities I | ||||
The Second Day (Jan. 7th, 2016) | |||||
9.00-9.50 | Keynote speech | Noël Nguyen
Studies on phonetic convergence between speakers in interactional speech |
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Themes | Talks | ||||
09.50-10.45 | Chinese as a second language | Marco Cappellini
Telecollaborations and (learner) corpora for French and Chinese as Foreign Languages
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Sun-A Kim
Chinese character learning: Interplay of character types, working memory, and Chinese proficiency |
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10.45-11.05 | Tea Break | ||||
11.05-12.00 | Articulation | Yohann Meynadier
Make Whisper Intelligible: Aerodynamics of Voicing Contrast and Vocal Effort in Whispered Fricatives |
Mantak Leung et. al.
TBC |
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12.00-12.55 | Regional variations | James German
Intonational Meaning and Regional Indexing in Corsican French Listeners |
Angel Chan
Asymmetries in Cantonese Children’s Processing of Relative Clauses: Variations and Competition |
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12.55-14.30 | Lunch Break | ||||
14.30-15.25 | Neuro-imaging study of language differences | Chotiga Pattamadilok
The Influence of Writing System Characteristics on Spoken Language Processing: A comparison between logographic and alphabetic system |
Caicai Zhang
Neural Impairment of Tone Language Speakers with Congenital Amusia |
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15.25-15.35 | Closing Session | ||||
15.35-16.05 | Tea Break | ||||
16.05-18.05 | Internal Discussion on Collaboration Possibilities II |
[UPDATED PROGRAMME]
We are gald to announce the 3d Variamu Workshop to be held at the Speech and Language Laboratory, Aix-en-Provence, on 1 & 2 October, 2015.
Please find below the programme.
All welcome!
Looking forward to seeing you
Thursday October 1st
09h00-09h15: Opening [Room A003]
Laurent Prévot Aix-Marseille University |
Perspectives for Variamu |
09h15 – 10h15: Plenary session [Room A003]
Marie-Claude Paris IUF / Paris 7 |
Adverbial clauses in Mandarin Chinese: some aspects of their syntax and semantics with reference to French |
10h15 – 10h30: Coffee Break
10h30 – 12h00: Session 1 [Room A003]
Philippe Blache Aix-Marseille University |
Chunks and properties: a new language processing architecture |
Emanuele Chersoni Aix-Marseille University |
Distributional data for constraint-based semantic parsing |
Laurent Prévot Aix-Marseille University |
Quantitative Comparative Interactional Linguistics |
12h00 – 13h30: Lunch
13h30 – 15h00: Session 2 [Conference Room]
James Sneed German Aix-Marseille University |
“Lexical” statistics for prosody: Goals and challenges |
Chu-Ren Huang, Menghan Jiang, Jingxia Lin Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
Comparable Corpus Based Approach to Description and Identification of Varieties of Chinese |
Marco Cappellini Aix-Marseille University |
Learning French and Mandarin Chinese through Skype: some conversational variations and methodological considerations. |
15h00 – 15h30: Coffee Break
15h30- 17h30: Session 3 [Conference Room]
Grégoire de Montcheuil Aix-Marseille University |
4-Couv : building a new treebank based on backcovers |
Jiajuan Xiong, Qingqing Zhao, and Chu-Ren Huang Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
Linguistic Synaesthesia in Chinese |
Francesca Strik Lievers University of Milano-Bicocca |
Synaesthesia across languages |
Chu-Ren Huang Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
A Summary of Variamu sub-projects in PolyU |
19h00: Diner
Friday October 2nd
09h30-10h45: Session 4 [Room –A001]
Cathy Wong Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
Variation in progress–English loanwords and borrowings in newspaper columnists’ writing in Hong Kong in the 1990s (video-conference) |
Organisational session 1 (video-conference) |
10h45-11h00: Coffee break
11h00-12h30: Session 5 [Conference Room]
Ana Nunes University of Macau |
Considerations of Portuguese linguistic variation in Macau: VariAmu Project |
Jasmin Sadat & Serge Pinto Aix-Marseille University |
Cross-liguistic comparison of dysarthria in Parkisnon’s disease: Cantonese vs. French |
12h30-14h00: Lunch
14h00-15h30: Organisational session [Conference Room]
15h30-15h45: Coffee Break
15h45-17h30: Organisational session [Conference Room]
19h30: Diner
Summer 2015 reveals a busy time for Variamu:
We are pleased to announce that, since August 2015, Dr. Jiajuan Xiong, has been appointed as the full time research associate for the PolyU funding of VariAMU project.
Warm welcome!
Roxana Fung is currently doing a 3-months research stay at the LPL for working with Brigitte Bigi on the Adding Cantonese into SPPAS project.
We take advantage of her presence for a presentation of her current work, to be held on May 6th (11am-12am), room B011
Merger is a much-studied sound change that involves the lost of contrast between two formerly distinct phonemes. It showcases the asymmetry of production and perception in sound change as numerous studies have documented that the collapse of phonemic distinction may not processing in the same rate in these two language faculties (such as DeCamp 1953, Labov et al 1991). The asymmetry fuels the hot debate on which faculty starts a sound change: perception, or production? This paper may shed intriguing lights on this debate by presenting a complicated interplay of the two language faculties in multiple and competing mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) tones based on a study of 120 participants of three age groups. HKC stands out from other tone languages in the world by having a rich tonal inventory with six contrastive tones. However, this rich system is in the process of merging. Among the five tone pairs that exhibited merger, an asymmetry of the asymmetry was attested in that production led perception in some mergers but followed perception in others. This paper attempts to provide an explanation for the asymmetry and fill the gap of limited studies on the interaction of the two language faculties in competing sound changes.
Dr Roxana Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main research interests are language variation and language change. She has carried out studies on voice quality and speech prosody on the distinction of Cantonese accents, variations and mergers in Cantonese tones and consonant codas, and the interplay of phonology, semantics, and pragmatics of sentence-final particles.
Jasmin Sadat’s stay abroad in Hongkong is linked to two student research projects that she co-supervises together with Serge Pinto in the Master of Speech Therapy at Hongkong Polytechnic University. In these projects, the students evaluate the impact of dysarthria in Parkinson’s disease in Cantonese in a similar manner as in a current ANR project that Jasmin works on in Aix-en-Provence. However, the students do not have any neurologist support in Hongkong to administer the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale with the patients and control participants that is necessary to classify the stage of the disease. Thus, during he stay, Jasmin Sadat will meet and evaluate all the patients and control participants that were previously tested and will prepare the next steps of the data analysis for their projects. In addition, she will spend several days in Macau to reinforce the collaboration previously initiated by Serge Pinto and Ana Nunes.
The pan-European platform EURAXESS published an interview of Professor Chu-ren HUANG, Dean of Faculty of Humanities, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Coordinator of Variamu.
The EU-funded platform provides information on Sino-European research and on high-profile personalities that shape the Sino-European research landscape, through extensive research experience including projects with European partners.
The interview is available here.
Visioseminar (LPL, PolyU, Macau U)
Thanks to the Variamu project and a collaboration with Tan Lee (University of Hong Kong), Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung launched the new version of SPPAS including the Cantonese language (sppas-1.6.3).
SPPAS is a software developed by the Laboratoire Parole et Language to perform automatic annotations including word segmentation and phoneme and syllable segmentation from a recorded speech sound and its transcription.; it also proposes components to perform the analysis of annotated data.
The inclusion of Cantonese into SPPAS will definitely facilitate the phonetic study of Cantonese.
Further efforts will be done to improve this version (dictionary, phone set in SAMPA) and the collaboration will continue!
Following the 1st Variamu workshop at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in March 2014, the 2nd Variamu Workshop was held on Wednesday 20th and Tuesday 21st August 2014 at the Speech and Language Laboratory, in Aix-en-Provence.
Participants presented their new projects, new collaborations and advancements in on-going collaborations. Besides sessions dedicated to each axis, the working sessions gave room to transversal discussions about variations and corpora, as well as the preparation of the Voice Training 2015, to be held in Hong Kong. The workshop was also the chance to present the experimental platform of the Lab.
The main outcomes of the workshop are presented below.
The detailed programme can be found here.
LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES SESSION
The core of the language technologies session was based on the integration of variation phenomena in automatic treatment of speech. Different sorts of variation were discussed, from meaning variation to cross-linguistic variations, and variations in pathological speech, shedding light on new methodological proposals (multimodality, ontology and semantics) and in-development tools (SPPAS, MarsaTag).
First, Laurent Prévot emphasised the need for multimodal corpora and analysis to take account of variation at an individual, situational and linguistic level. Through a study of feed-back in several speech situations (dialogal corpora, spontaneous speech, task-orientated speech), his results showed that the most important factor of variation are the meta-data (that is, the speakers). Multimodality opens therefore path to the possibility to compare inter-individual, inter-situational, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural situation.
Brigitte Bigi and Roxana Fung presented a new Variamu project consisting into the development of the software SPPAS into Cantonese. This collaboration emerged to respond to the lack of automatic tool in Cantonese. SPPAS is an automatic speech segmentation and annotation tool based on language-independant algorithms and allowing tokenization, phonetization, alignement, syllabification, repetition, etc. In order to develop the Cantonese version of SPPAS, a pronunciation dictionary, a word-based dictionary and an acoustic model are needed. The Hong Kong Corpus for Adult Cantonese (HKCAC), an 8 hours corpus including detailed phonetic descriptions will provide material for the software. The discussion brought the issues of code-switching treatment, a frequent phenomenon in Hong Kong Cantonese (Cantonese, English, Mandarin).
Quantitative approaches for studying variations was the topic of Emilien Gorenne’s talk. He presented a study of automatic detection of variations in Schizophrenian patients’ speech. 18 features were measured, such as fluency, lexical richness, number of verbs, etc. The outcomes show inter-individual and inter-situational variations.
Grégoire de Montcheuil provided an overview of Ortolang, a collaborative project involving 6 laboratory partners. Ortolang includes a corpus and data repository (SLDR), speech annotation tools (SPPAS and Phonedit), and a speech transcription tool (MarsaTag). The presentation focused then on MarsaTag, a tool combining a tokenizer, a morphosyntax tagger, a POS tagger and a parser. Further developments will consist in building a webservice and a common XML data exchange. So far, the software is developed for written or spoken French input, while the adaptation for Chinese would be possible
Demonstrating that metaphors requires conceptual mapping from source domain to target domain, Chu-Ren Huang proposed to model the conceptual mapping of metaphor on a theory of ontology. Such a conceptual mapping principle offers three methodological and theoretical advantages: 1) to predict possible new uses of metaphors, 2) to provide a classification for non-literal uses, and 3) to measure the conceptual difference of the terms compared.
Working Session 1: CORPORA & TOOLS
The crucial goal of Variamu is to have comparable datasets in order to make cross-linguistic comparisons. For this purpose, a data repository will be created. The repository seeks to host the broadest range of types of speech and metadata: interactional data, second language data, treebanks, aligned corpora for Natural Language Processing, etc.
The repository will allow:
A list of useful corpora and comparable data with brief description will be designed, with the view to create a Variamu data collection on the Speech and Language Data Repository, (part of the Ortolang project). The status of the data (private or public) is still to discuss.
Brigitte Bigi (AMU), Philippe Blache (AMU), Roxana Fung (PolyU), Mantak Leung (PolyU), Grégoire de Montcheuil (AMU), and Stéphane Rauzy (AMU) will take part in the repository project.
LINGUISTICS & PHONETICS SESSION
The second session gathered works, mainly dedicated to variations both within and across languages. Prosodic, phonetic and syntactical features of Cantonese, English and French were scrutinized, mixing contrastive approaches and structural variations descriptions.
Roxana Fung exposed a comparative study of prosody in two varieties of Cantonese: Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese. Measures on vowel space (formants), voice quality, key, register, and speech rhythm were made. First results displays that voice quality and speech prosody are two promising areas to explore phonetic distinction. The outcomes were enlightened by a presentation of evaluative epi-discourses about this variation.
Reporting on the Vowel Variation in Conversational Speech project, Christine Meunier presented the first results. The project studies cross-linguistic variation of vowel reduction in spontaneous speech. To understand this phenomenon, the pronunciation of phonological neighbours is observed in different languages. Outcomes in French shows that, differently than in Spanish and English, higher is the neighbourhood, more speakers hyperarticulate, while perception is more difficult. The next step will consist in a comparison of French results with Cantonese and will include tonal factors, lexical factors (word frequency, etc.), syntactical factors (function words vs. content words) and syllabic factors (monosyllabic vs. plurisyllabic words), as well as speakers’ characteristics (vowel reduction).
If segmental features are frequently under scrutiny in pronunciation studies, supra-segmental features, such as stress, are often neglected. Word stress in English is highly unpredictable and there is a high variation across Englishes. For Hong Kong English, stress may be influenced by Cantonese tones, Cantonese stress and metric rules. After a solid review of the literature, Cathy Wong presented an experimental design methodology to study stress in Hon Kong English. The study seeks to determine if there are HKE stress patterns, and if such, whether they are structural or normative. The results could open path to comparison with other Englishes
Julie Abbou discussed the embedment of gender in language, focusing on the variation of the gender grammaticalization across languages. Through an exploratory study of translation from English to Cantonese, she aimed to compare the linguistic levels and “spaces” of gender in English and Cantonese, two so-called genderless languages. The presentation rose also questions about the status and normalisation of written Cantonese.
LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY SESSION
This session was dedicated to writing studies and pathology studies.
Chinese writing system components are made up of stroke, logographemes (cluster of strokes), radicals and characters. In his presentation Dustin Lau questioned how to delimit logographeme unit. Based on the hypothesis that the writing duration will be higher between the end of a logographeme and the beginning of the next one, than between 2 strokes from the same logographeme, Dustin Lau made a methodological proposal, consisting in measuring the time distance between stroke writing. The results show that the longest duration lies at the radical boundary. These first outcomes give avenues for next studies, such as the nature of the stimuli (dictation, radical copying, …) or developemental data, such as kid’s sequence of development.
Serge Pinto gave an update of the Speech in bilingual Parkinsonian’s disease patients project, involving Ana Nunes and him. After a presentation of Parkinsonian’s disease symptoms concerning language (among others, speech impairment due to brain damage), Serge Pinto presented the FraLusoPark protocole, gathering France, Brazil and Macau teams with the view to share it with the Hong Kong team.
Working Session 2: PREPARATION OF THE VOICE TRAINING IN HK
The Voice Training session is a new collaborative Variamu project.
Gathering AMU, PolyU and Macau U colleagues, this training session will consist in a week of lectures and workshops addressed to the PolyU Speech Therapy School students. The Training will be held in Hong Kong, early March 2015.
Participants
Camille Galant (AMU), Alain Ghio (AMU), Antoine Giovanni (AMU), Ana Nunes (Macau U), Serge Pinto (AMU) and Joana Revis (AMU) will join the new Speech Therapy School in Hong Kong for a one-week training in collaboration with Angel Chan (PolyU), Dustin Lau (PolyU), Mantak Leung (PolyU), and Valérie Pereira (PolyU).
Dustin Lau will supervise the event.
Contents
The training will consist of:
The total teaching load will be 18 to 24 hours.
The Aix team will propose a provisional programme and title proposals, based on the following topics:
The schedule needs to be checked in accordance with PolyU timetable in the next few days.
Working Session 3: LINGUISTIC VARIATIONS
Too often, linguistics analyses language by separating the different factors, in order to face the linguistic complexity. However, it is now well evidenced that this separation leads to the loss of crucial elements, since understanding language implies understanding variation.
In addition, variation has long been treated as noise. It is only recently that attempts are made to integrate variation in the analysis and to understand its role in the language complexity. It remains that variation is an imprecise word.
This session shed light on the different dimensions of variation at stake in language studies.
Two transversal dimensions completed these topics:
– Variation in prototypical situations vs. Variation in actual productions
– Macro-variations (across languages: different grammar rules,) and micro variation (within a linguistic system: different relations of a given phoneme / word, etc.)
Methodological implications follow this exploration of variation dimensions:
– To measure variation (according to a given state)
– To adapt tools and theories, by taking account of variation
– To use variation measures for linguistic analysis.