Linguistics Colloquium Series: Toward speaker-based automatic clustering of World Englishes

Presented by Dr. Nabuaki Minematsu, University of Tokyo

Friday, December 7, 2012 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM EST
477 (conference room)

World Englishes refer to the emergence of localized variety of English such as Japanese English, Taiwanese English, and American English. If we take a very detailed look at the pronunciations of World Englishes, however, they should be treated not by a unit of countries or regions but by a unit of individuals. In our previous studies, we made an attempt to cluster a variety of "Japanese" English pronunciations automatically and it was very successful. Recently, we're interested in clustering World Englishes based on individuals. If speaker-based automatic clustering of English pronunciation is possible, a learner of English can know how he or she is surrounded by other speakers of English. In this talk, we present some preliminary results of speaker-based automatic clustering of World Englishes using speech accent archive.

Hosted by GMU Linguistics Club.

Sponsored by Linguistics Program.