Aikuma is an Android App for collecting speech recordings with time-aligned translations. The app includes a text-free interface for consecutive interpretation, designed for users who are not literate. The Aikuma won Grand Prize in the Open Source Software World Challenge (2013).

Name

Aikuma means "meeting place" in Usarufa, a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...

where this software was first used in 2012.

History

Aikuma was developed with sponsorship from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

, including a $101,501 (US) project, "to use mobile telephones to collect larger amounts of data on undocumented

endangered languages An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

than would never be possible through usual fieldwork." Aikuma and its modified version (Lig-Aikuma) have been used for collecting substantial quantities of audio in remote indigenous villages.Blachon, D., Gauthier, E., Besacier, L., Kouarata, G-N., Adda-Decker, M. and Rialland, A. (2016). Parallel Speech Collection for Under-resourced Language Studies Using the Lig-Aikuma Mobile Device App. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

/ref> A modified version of the app, called Lig-Aikuma, has been developed at the

Université Grenoble Alpes The Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA, French: meaning "''Grenoble Alps University''") is a public research university in Grenoble, France. Founded in 1339, it is the third largest university in France with about 60,000 students and over 3,000 resea ...

(LIG laboratory) and implements new features such as elicitation of speech from text, images and videos.

Similar Software

Lingua Libre Lingua Libre is an online collaborative project and tool by the Wikimedia France association, which aims to build a collaborative, multilingual, audiovisual corpus under free license. Description Lingua Libre enables to record words, phrases ...

is an online collaborative project and tool by the Wikimedia France association, which can be used as a tool for Language Preservation. Lingua Libre enables to record words, phrases, or sentences of any language, oral (audio recording) or signed (video recording). It is a highly efficient method to record endangered languages since up to 1000 words can be recorded per hour. All the content is under Free License, and speakers of minority languages are encouraged to record their own dialects.

References

Application software Computational linguistics Linguistic research software {{Comp-ling-stub