An official website of the United States government
This paper describes a novel computational toolkit for tonal analysis: ATLAS (Automated Tone Level Annotation System). Tone remains a challenge in many language documentation projects, and far too often still, one comes across descriptive and theoretical treatments of tone languages in which tone marking is entirely absent or of questionable accuracy. ATLAS takes as its input a WAV file and TextGrid delimiting tone- bearing segments and outputs normalized pitch level annotations intermediate between raw f0 and phonemic categories. These “tone level” annotations represent a discrete numerical version of the dashes often used as a broad phonetic transcription of tone. The number of levels can be set by the researcher, and a number of raw phonetic measures are also outputted by the tool. ATLAS is designed to be used by anyone regardless of experience with tone or computational methods, thus promoting the inclusion of objective, replicable pitch data in documentary, descriptive, or theoretical materials on tone languages. We also show the utility of ATLAS’s broad phonetic annotations in understanding the surface realization of already determined phonemic categories and in making hypotheses about unanalyzed tone systems.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on September 11, 2026
Dialectal tone description enhances historical tonology
Abstract This paper illustrates that in-depth descriptive work of closely related varieties of Dinka, a Nilotic tone language with an unusually complex suprasegmental system, provides solutions to previously unanswered questions about historical tone change. Using data from six dialects, I show the directions and mechanisms of tone splits and mergers. In-depth descriptive work combined with comparison allows innovation and novel discoveries from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. These are also powerful tools for historical tonology and may ultimately shed light on the origins of tonal phenomena with previously opaque historical perspectives.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2313787
- PAR ID:
- 10650795
- Publisher / Repository:
- Diachronica
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Diachronica
- Volume:
- 42
- Issue:
- 3-4
- ISSN:
- 0176-4225
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 305 to 323
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Mace, Ruth (Ed.)Abstract Previous work has proposed various mechanisms by which the environment may affect the emergence of linguistic features. For example, dry air may cause careful control of pitch to be more effortful, and so affect the emergence of linguistic distinctions that rely on pitch such as lexical tone or vowel inventories. Criticisms of these proposals point out that there are both historical and geographic confounds that need to be controlled for. We take a causal inference approach to this problem to design the most detailed test of the theory to date. We analyse languages from the Bantu language family, using a prior geographic–phylogenetic tree of relationships to establish where and when languages were spoken. This is combined with estimates of humidity for those times and places, taken from historical climate models. We then estimate the strength of causal relationships in a causal path model, controlling for various influences of inheritance and borrowing. We find no evidence to support the previous claims that humidity affects the emergence of lexical tone. This study shows how using causal inference approaches lets us test complex causal claims about the cultural evolution of language.more » « less
-
To investigate the well-observed racial disparities in computer vision systems that analyze images of humans, researchers have turned to skin tone as a more objective annotation than race metadata for fairness performance evaluations. However, the current state of skin tone annotation procedures is highly varied. For instance, researchers use a range of untested scales and skin tone categories, have unclear annotation procedures, and provide inadequate analyses of uncertainty. In addition, little attention is paid to the positionality of the humans involved in the annotation process—both designers and annotators alike—and the historical and sociological context of skin tone in the United States. Our work is the first to investigate the skin tone annotation process as a sociotechnical project. We surveyed recent skin tone annotation procedures and conducted annotation experiments to examine how subjective understandings of skin tone are embedded in skin tone annotation procedures. Our systematic literature review revealed the uninterrogated association between skin tone and race and the limited effort to analyze annotator uncertainty in current procedures for skin tone annotation in computer vision evaluation. Our experiments demonstrated that design decisions in the annotation procedure such as the order in which the skin tone scale is presented or additional context in the image (i.e., presence of a face) significantly affected the resulting inter-annotator agreement and individual uncertainty of skin tone annotations. We call for greater reflexivity in the design, analysis, and documentation of procedures for evaluation using skin tone.more » « less
-
Variable-pressure electron-beam lithography (VP-EBL) employs an ambient gas at subatmospheric pressures to reduce charging during electron-beam lithography. VP-EBL has been previously shown to eliminate pattern distortion and provide improved resolution when patterning poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) on insulating substrates. However, it remains unknown how water vapor affects the contrast and clearing dose nor has the effect of water vapor on the negative-tone behavior of PMMA been studied. In addition, water vapor has recently been shown to alter the radiation chemistry of the VP-EBL process for Teflon AF. Such changes in radiation chemistry have not been explored for PMMA. In this work, VP-EBL was conducted on conductive substrates to study the effect of water vapor on PMMA patterning separately from the effects of charge dissipation. In addition, both positive and negative-tone processes were studied to determine the effect of water vapor on both chain scission and cross-linking. The contrast of PMMA was found to improve significantly with increasing water vapor pressure for both positive and negative-tone patterning. The clearing dose for positive-tone patterning increases moderately with vapor pressure as would be expected for electron scattering in a gas. However, the onset set dose for negative-tone patterning increased dramatically with pressure revealing a more significant change in the exposure mechanism. X-ray photoelectron spectra and infrared transmission spectra indicate that water vapor only slightly alters the composition of exposed PMMA. Also, electron scattering in water vapor yielded a much larger clear region around negative-tone patterns. This effect could be useful for increasing the range of the developed region around cross-linked PMMA beyond the backscattered electron range. Thus, VP-EBL for PMMA introduces a new means of tuning clearing/onset dose and contrast, while allowing additional control over the size of the cleared region around negative-tone patterns.more » « less
-
Abstract While many employees read and respond to work‐related e‐mails in the evenings after work, the mechanisms through which after‐hours e‐mailing influences well‐being remain poorly understood. In particular, there has been limited consideration of whether different characteristics of after‐hours e‐mails (frequency, duration, perceived tone) may trigger work‐related rumination that influences employee well‐being at bedtime (i.e., the end of the post‐work period). To address this gap in the literature, data were collected from 59 employees during a 5‐day daily survey period. We expected after‐hours e‐mail frequency, duration, and perceived tone to indirectly relate to employee vigour and fatigue at bedtime (two common well‐being criteria) via affective rumination and problem‐solving pondering (two major forms of work‐related rumination). Our results indicated that a more negatively perceived after‐hours e‐mail tone influenced both vigour and fatigue via affective rumination. Further, our findings suggested diverging implications of after‐hours e‐mailing frequency and duration for problem‐solving pondering, with longer duration and more frequent after‐hours e‐mailing co‐varying with higher and lower levels of this form of rumination, respectively. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering various characteristics of after‐hours e‐mailing and corresponding implications of work‐related rumination when studying employee well‐being.more » « less
