The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which record new spoken language data, digitize available recordings and annotate these multimedia data in order to provide comprehensive language corpora as databases for future research on and for endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Specifically, we describe a script providing interactivity between different morphosyntactic analysis modules implemented as Finite State Transducers and ELAN, a Graphical User Interface tool for annotating and presenting multimodal corpora. Ultimately, the spoken corpora created in our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which use similar data and technical frameworks and are carried out collaboratively in Uppsala, Tromsø, Syktyvkar and Freiburg. Our projects record and annotate spoken language data in order to provide comprehensive speech corpora as databases for future research on and for these endangered-and under-described-Uralic speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Ultimately, the multimodal corpora created by our projects will be useful for scientifically significant quantitative investigations on these languages in the future.

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Izhva Komi language documentation project, which records new spoken language data, digitizes available recordings and annotate these multimedia data in order to provide a comprehensive language corpus as a databases for future research on and for this endangered -and under-described -Uralic speech community. While working with a spoken variety and in the framework of documentary linguistics, we apply language technology methods and tools, which have been applied so far only to normalized written languages. Specifically, we describe a script providing interactivity between ELAN, a Graphical User Interface tool for annotating and presenting multimodal corpora, and different morphosyntactic analysis modules implemented as Finite State Transducers and Constraint Grammar for rule-based morphosyntactic tagging and disambiguation. Our aim is to challenge current manual approaches in the annotation of language documentation corpora.

We demonstrate work in progress 1 using the Nite XML Toolkit on a corpus of multimodal dialogues with an MP3 player collected in a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) experiments and annotated with a rich feature set at several layers. We designed an NXT data model, converted experiment log file data and manual transcriptions into NXT, and are building annotation tools using NXT libraries.

The SAMMIE 1 system is an in-car multimodal dialogue system for an MP3 application. It is used as a testing environment for our research in natural, intuitive mixed-initiative interaction, with particular emphasis on multimodal output planning and realization aimed to produce output adapted to the context, including the driver's attention state w.r.t. the primary driving task.