Unwritten knowledge

America’s Constitution, Written and Unwritten

Normalising Audio Transcriptions for Unwritten Languages

The task of documenting the world’s languages is a mainstream activity in linguistics which is yet to spill over into computational linguistics. We propose a new task of transcription normalisation as an algorithmic method for speeding up the process of transcribing audio sources, leading to text collections of usable quality. We report on the application of sentence and word alignment algorith...

Large-Scale Text Collection for Unwritten Languages

Existing methods for collecting texts from endangered languages are not creating the quantity of data that is needed for corpus studies and natural language processing tasks. This is because the process of transcribing and translating from audio recordings is too onerous. A more effective method, we argue, is to involve local speakers in the field location, using an audio-only translation inter...

Unwritten rules: virtual bargaining underpins social interaction, culture, and society

Many social interactions require humans to coordinate their behavior across a range of scales. However, aspects of intentional coordination remain puzzling from within several approaches in cognitive science. Sketching a new perspective, we propose that the complex behavioral patterns - or 'unwritten rules' - governing such coordination emerge from an ongoing process of 'virtual bargaining'. So...

1. The ‘Oral’ Nature of African Unwritten Literature