A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology
This addresses the data scarcity problem for researchers in phonetic typology, though it is an incremental resource creation effort.
The authors tackled the problem of insufficient data for phonetic typology research by creating VoxClamantis v1.0, a large-scale corpus with aligned segments and phoneme-level labels for 690 readings across 635 languages, which enables large-scale cross-linguistic phonetic investigations.
A major hurdle in data-driven research on typology is having sufficient data in many languages to draw meaningful conclusions. We present VoxClamantis v1.0, the first large-scale corpus for phonetic typology, with aligned segments and estimated phoneme-level labels in 690 readings spanning 635 languages, along with acoustic-phonetic measures of vowels and sibilants. Access to such data can greatly facilitate investigation of phonetic typology at a large scale and across many languages. However, it is non-trivial and computationally intensive to obtain such alignments for hundreds of languages, many of which have few to no resources presently available. We describe the methodology to create our corpus, discuss caveats with current methods and their impact on the utility of this data, and illustrate possible research directions through a series of case studies on the 48 highest-quality readings. Our corpus and scripts are publicly available for non-commercial use at https://voxclamantisproject.github.io.