Upcoming colloquium: Kathleen Currie Hall
Our next colloquium speaker will be Dr. Kathleen Currie Hall from the University of British Columbia, department of Linguistics.
Date:
Location: Clearihue C108
Talk title: Phonological CorpusTools and its Applications
Abstract: In this talk, I will present Phonological CorpusTools (PCT), a newly developed and freely available software for doing phonological analysis on transcribed corpora. There is an ever-increasing interest in exploring the roles of frequency and usage in understanding phonological phenomena, and corpora of language give us a way of making generalizations across wide swaths of such usage, exploring patterns in under-documented languages, and creating balanced stimuli in experiments. Many corpora and existing corpus-analysis software tools, however, are focused on dialogue- and sentence-level analysis, and/or the computational skills needed to efficiently handle large corpora can be daunting to learn. PCT is designed with the phonologist in mind and has an easy-to-use graphical user interface that requires no programming knowledge. During the presentation, I will explain the various kinds of corpora that can be examined, introduce the different analyses that can be run, and give examples of research projects that PCT has been applied to.