EdUHK LML DH Seminar Series (25/11/2022)

Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South by Professor Kevin Tang (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Zoom | November 25, 2022 5:00 pm

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Abstract

Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South by Prof. Kevin Tang

The Education University of Hong Kong Seminar Series on Digital Humanities
25 November 2022 (Friday) Online (via Zoom) 17:00 to 18:00 (HKT)

In this talk, I will introduce the Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South project (https://raaohgs.oral.history.ufl.edu/) started in 2021, supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), educators and other community members. I will focus on reporting our computational efforts in making the voices and histories of African Americans who reside in the Gulf South accessible. I will report on the technical challenges in annotating a corpus of spoken African American English consisting of oral history interviews – in particular, transcription errors generated by Automatic Speech Recognition tools and human transcribers, the prevalence of linguistic features of African American English in oral history interviews and the development of an automatic linguistic annotation pipeline.

About the speaker

Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang is a University Professor in English Linguistics with specialisations in Phonetics/Phonology/Morphology at the Department of English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He holds a courtesy appointment at the University of Florida in Computational Language Science. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Linguistics from University College London, an M.Eng, and a B.A. in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and his postdoctoral training from Yale University. He’s the director of the Speech, Lexicon, And Modeling lab (SLaM lab) (https://slam.phil.hhu.de/).

His research interests lie in computational linguistics with a special interest in speech technology (phonetics and phonology). He conducts data-intensive research on linguistic variations, human health research and language technology. His current interdisciplinary research projects include developing a smart pseudo-palate for linguistic and biomedical applications with a focus on evaluating parkinsonism, developing a sociolinguistic-enabled virtual health assistant for African Americans and mitigating social biases in speech technology against African American English speakers.