The YouTube corpus of Singapore English podcasts

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Singapore English

World Englishes are spoken today on practically all continents and in a wide range of different social and cultural contexts, with many different contact languages involved. This diversity of input factors quite naturally should make us expect widely different outcomes of the individual evolutionary processes. Contrary to this expectation, however, surprising similarities between many World Englishes have been observed, with respect to both their sociolinguistic settings and their linguistic properties. For example, on the social side we can observe the emergence of a ‘complaint tradition’ (discussed further later), of local varieties of English adopting the role of local identity carriers, and of processes towards codification in a wide range of different countries. In a similar vein, linguistically speaking, phenomena like plural uses of noncount nouns, progressive forms of stative verbs, the formation of hybrid compounds, or the occurrence of innovative (but basically similar) verb complementation patterns have also been found to transcend regional and linguistic boundaries. Of course, this is not to deny the diversity that is also there, naturally and unavoidably. For example, certain regional pronunciation phenomena of English in Nigeria reveal transfer from Yoruba, and some rules of the grammar of colloquial Singaporean English can be accounted for as substrate phenomena from Chinese and other local languages. So an interesting question to ask is, therefore: how can differences or similarities between World Englishes be accounted for by their developmental patterns? To some extent an answer to these questions also depends on definitions and deli-mitations. The older term ‘New Englishes’, as coined by Platt et al. (1984) and others, focused on second-language varieties of the outer circle only, thus circumscribing a relatively more homogeneous and consistent category of language varieties. ‘Postcolonial Englishes’, in contrast, the term preferred by Schneider (2007), also includes native-speaker colonial settler varieties like American or Australian English and emphasizes the common origins of inner and outer circle varieties in shared processes of colonial history and similar postcolonial developmental trajectories. Kachru’s term ‘World Englishes’, the broadest of all, includes all inner circle varieties, has a specialinterest in outer circle (typically second language or ‘L2’) varieties, and recognizes a fuzzy boundary in the expanding circle, encompassing countries where English did not have colonial foundations, but is nevertheless spreading rapidly these days as a ‘foreign’ or an ‘international language’. The question of how similar or different these varieties are also needs to consider these categorial distinctions. Basically, however, a broad understanding of ‘World Englishes’ is adopted here.

Observed similarities between postcolonial Englishes (PCEs) and non-postcolonial Englishes (non-PCEs) pose a challenge for attempts at modeling the global spread of English. The model of Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces (EIFM) aims to address this by arguing that both PCEs and non-PCEs develop along similar lines. Both present much the same five phases as those identified by Schneider’s Dynamic Model. While the EIFM’s strategy has its merits, it also faces some problems. This chapter suggests that a strategy of convergence might actually be more fruitful. Under a strategy of convergence, both PCEs and non-PCEs are acknowledged to have different histories rather than the similar histories that the EIFM emphasizes. Both PCEs and non-PCEs, however, converge in the era of late modernity.

ABSTRACT: The use of Chinese discourse particles in informal speech or in the speech of those with lower levels of education is an interesting substratum influence on Singaporean English. However, it is shown in this paper that in addition to the functions of different particles to indicate obviousness, disapproval or intimacy, or to highlight a particular lexical item, there are other functions of a more universal nature. For British English, two main types of intonation are posited: proclaiming tone (falling) and referring tone (rising). In most ‘native’ varieties of English, the tonic syllable (or nucleus), the syllable on which pitch movement begins, is in an ordinary lexical item, However, in Singaporean English, the pitch movement often occurs on a following particle. The concept of proclaiming and referring tones appears to be valid for Singaporean English except for this use of the discourse particles as the main indicators of these tones.

The focus in automatic speech recognition (ASR) research has gradually shifted from read speech to spontaneous speech. ASR systems can reach an accuracy of above 90% when evaluated on read speech, but the accuracy of spontaneous speech is much lower. This high error rate is due in part to the poor modeling of pronunciations within spontaneous speech. An analysis of pronunciation variations at the acoustic level reveals that pronunciation variations include both complete changes and partial changes. Complete changes are the replacement of a canonical phoneme by another alternative phone, such as ‘b’ being pronounced as ‘p’. Partial changes are variations within the phoneme and include diacritics, such as nasalization, centralization, voiceless, voiced, etc. Most of the current work in pronunciation modeling attempts to represent pronunciation variations either by alternative phonetic representations or by the concatenation of subphone units at the state level. In this dissertation, we show that partial changes are a lot less clear-cut than previously assumed and cannot be modeled by mere representation in alternate or concatenation of phone units. When partial changes occur, a phone is not completely substituted, deleted or inserted, and the acoustic representation at the phone level is often ambiguous. We suggest that in addition to phonetic representations of pronunciation variations, the ambiguity of acoustic representations caused by partial changes should be taken into account. The acoustic model for spontaneous speech should be different from that of read and planned speech—it should have a strong ability to cover partial changes. We propose modeling partial changes by combing the pronunciation model with acoustic model at the state level. Based on this pronunciation model, we reconstruct the acoustic model to improve its resolution without sacrificing the model's identity with the goal of accommodating pronunciation variations. The effectiveness of this approach was evaluated on the Hub4NE Mandarin Broadcast News Corpus with different styles of speech. It has been proven that the new pronunciation modeling approach does not help much for pre-planned speech, but it provides a significant gain for spontaneous speech. To our best knowledge, this dissertation is the first of its kind that systemically investigates both complete changes and partial changes in spontaneous Mandarin speech. The results reported in this dissertation demonstrate that our approaches are both efficient and effective.

How to recognize and understand spontaneous speech is one of the most important issues in state-of-the-art speech recognition technology. In this context, a five-year large scale national project entitled Spontaneous speech: corpus and processing technology started in Japan in 1999. This paper gives an overview of the project and reports on the major results of experiments that have been conducted so far at Tokyo Institute of Technology, including spontaneous presentation speech recognition, automatic speech summarization, and message-driven speech recognition. The paper also discusses the most important research problems to be solved in order to achieve ultimate spontaneous speech recognition systems.

While much has been written about the unique set of discourse particles in colloquial Singapore English, other discourse markers which belong to the common core of English have been neglected. This paper deals with basically, a rather recent addition to the paradigm of discourse markers which typically move along the following clines in their development: clause-internal adverbial > sentence adverbial > discourse particle; scope within the proposition > scope over the proposition > scope over discourse. This paper will use the evidence from the Singaporean subcorpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to trace the functions and contexts for basically and to determine whether the grammaticalization clines proposed on the basis of British English also hold for an Outer Circle variety such as Singapore English with its rich array of indigenized discourse particles.

We propose a system which automatically generate audio summaries for podcasts, allowing listeners to quickly preview podcast episodes. The proposed system first transcribes the audio from a podcast using automatic speech recognition (ASR), then summarizes the transcript using extractive text summarization, and finally returns the audio associated with the text summary. Motivated by a lack of relevant datasets for this task, we created our own by transcribing the audio from various podcasts and generating summaries for these transcripts using a manual annotation tool. After transcription, the text is processed through natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to extract the most important points, key topics, and relevant information from the podcast. The first component of the system involves automatic transcription, where speech-to-text algorithms convert audio podcast episodes into textual format. This transcription process employs state-of-the-art machine learning models trained on large datasets to achieve high accuracy and reliability. The system employs natural language processing (NLP) techniques to generate concise summaries of podcast episodes. These summaries aim to capture the essence of the content, providing users with a quick overview of key topics, insights, and discussions covered in the episode. Key Words: Podcasts, audio summarization, automatic speech recognition, automatic summarization.

For some reason, Indian English (IndE) discourse particles have not been as popular with the World Englishes scientific community as their counterparts in Singapore English. Whereas the whole range of discourse particles in colloquial Singapore English has already been treated quite exhaustively, the available literature only offers some scanty remarks on individual IndE discourse particles. This paper will attempt a systematic treatment of the meaning and use of the IndE discourse particle yaar on the basis of data from the spoken part of The International Corpus of English, Indian component (ICE-IND). Since ICE-IND also includes information about speakers’ sociolinguistic profiles, the descriptive account of the meaning of yaar will be augmented by an analysis of the distribution throughout the IndE speech community.

This paper summarizes my 40 years of research on speech and speaker recognition, focusing on selected topics that I have investigated at NTT Laboratories, Bell Laboratories and Tokyo Institute of Technology with my colleagues and students. These topics include: the importance of spectral dynamics in speech perception; speaker recognition methods using statistical features, cepstral features, and HMM/GMM; text-prompted speaker recognition; speech recognition using dynamic features; Japanese LVCSR; robust speech recognition; spontaneous speech corpus construction and analysis; spontaneous speech recognition; automatic speech summarization; and WFST-based decoder development and its applications.

Analysis and recognition of spontaneous speech using Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese

07–484Aceto, Michael (East Carolina U, USA; acetom@ecu.edu), Statian Creole English: An English-derived language emerges in the Dutch Antilles. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 411–435.07–485Anchimbe, Eric A. (U Munich, Germany), World Englishes and the American tongue. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 3–9.07–486Bartha, Csilla & Anna Borbély (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary; bartha@nytud.hu), Dimensions of linguistic otherness: Prospects of minority language maintenance in Hungary. Language Policy (Springer) 5.3 (2006), 337–365.07–487Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan (North-West U, Potchefstroom, South Africa; basascvr@puk.ac.za), Integrativeness: Untenable for world Englishes learners?World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 437–450.07–488Gooskens, Charlotte (U Groningen, The Netherlands; c.s.gooskens@rug.nl) & Renée van Bezooijen, Mutual comprehensibility of written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or asymmetrical?Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press) 21.4 (2006), 543–557.07–489Gooskens, Charlotte & Wilbert Heeringa (U Groningen, The Netherlands; c.s.gooskens@rug.nl), The relative contribution of pronunciational, lexical, and prosodic differences to the perceived distances between Norwegian dialects. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press) 21.4 (2006), 477–492.07–490Guilherme, Manuela (U De Coimbra, Portgual), English as a Global language and education for cosmopolitan citizenship. Language and International Communication (Multilingual Matters) 7.1 (2007), 72–90.07–491Koscielecki, Marek (The Open U, Hongk Kong, China). Japanized English, its context and socio-historical background. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 25–31.07–492Meilin, Chen (Three Gorges University, China) & Hu Xiaoqiong, Towards the acceptability of China English at home and abroad.English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 44–52.07–493Mesthrie, Rajend (U Cape Town, South Africa; raj@humanities.uct.ac.za), World Englishes and the multilingual history of English. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 381–390.07–494Poole, Brian (Ministry of Manpower, Muscat, the Sultanate of Oman), Some effects of Indian English on the language as it is used in Oman. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 21–24.07–495Robinson, Ian (U Calabria, Italy), Genre and loans: English words in an Italian newspaper. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 9–20.07–496Ross, Kathryn (U Oxford, UK; kathryn.ross@trinity.ox.ac.uk), Status of women in highly literate societies: The case of Kerala and Finland. Literacy (Blackwell) 40.3 (2006), 171–178.07–497Sala, Bonaventure M. (Cameroon), Does Cameroonian English have grammatical norms?English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 59–64.07–498Wei-Yu Chen, Cheryl (National Taiwan Normal U, Taiwan; wychen66@hotmail.com), The mixing of English in magazine advertisements in Taiwan. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 467–478.07–499Wong, Jock (National U Singapore, Singapore; jockonn@hotmail.com), Contextualizing aunty in Singaporean English. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 451–466.07–500Xiaoxia, Cui (Yunnan U, China), An understanding of ‘China English’ and the learning and use of the English language in China. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.4 (2006), 40–43.07–501Young, Ming Yee Carissa (Macao U Science & Technology, Macau; myyoung@must.edu.mo), Macao students' attitudes toward English: A post-1999 survey. World Englishes (Blackwell) 25.3 & 4 (2006), 479–490.

Our study analyses some prosodic correlates of nine French words or expressions : alors, quoi, voilà, bon, ben, tu sais, vous savez, tu vois, vous voyez.Besides their general grammatical categorization as adverb, pronoun, preposition, 'introducer', adjective, adverb and sentence, these expressions are very frequently used as discourse particles (DP) in spontaneous speech.Our goal is to determine to what extent intrinsic and contextual prosodic properties are useful and sufficient to characterize their DP and non-DP functions.The expressions under study are extracted from large corpora, than a manual annotation is carried out to distinguish DP and non-DP functions and an automatic processing is applied for prosodic data extraction and labelling.This allows getting fine-grained and systematic prosodic information.Automatic classification tests of the DP functions based solely on prosodic parameters are carried out and lead to very encouraging results as correct identification ranges from 73% to more than 90%.Finally an automatic clustering procedure provides prosodically significant DP sub-classes for every studied expression.

Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.

n this book, leading scholars in the field of World Englishes (WE) offer fresh perspectives in re-thinking issues on the use of English as a global language in an interconnected world. Established as a legitimate field of study, WE offers a conceptual framework which has influenced scholarship in many related disciplines: contact linguistics, postcolonial Englishes, English as a lingua franca, English as an international language, and applied linguistics. This seminal volume will have an excellent balance between theoretical and empirical works focusing on scholarship that has arisen in relation to the Kachruvian Three Concentric Circles model.