Supporting language use and research through transformative technologies
CoEDL rode a tide of unprecedented growth in language science technologies. A mandate to explore the intersection between language and computer engineering was embedded in the Centre through its Technology program. Led by CI Janet Wiles, the Technology program worked across the Centre’s nodes and other programs to facilitate the development of tools and systems that, for example, would support transcription, language learning or people living with special communication needs.
This work harnessed the transformative power of new technologies in interdisciplinary and collaborative ways. A lasting contribution to how CoEDL members and engineers develop and understand technologies was the program’s emphasis on co-design methods and workshops. Bringing engineers together with linguists, speech pathologists and living experience experts ensured that the tools and technologies produced are effective and useful, as well as innovative.
The highlights below introduce three projects at the heart of the Technology program: a pipeline to assist the transcription of language recordings; an ecosystem of language technologies to support the lives of people living with dementia and their carers; and software that helps researchers visualise, analyse and interpret human communication.
Hero image: Advisory Committee member Craig Cornelius interacts with Opie, a robot designed by CoEDL members at the Centre’s University of Queensland node to facilitate the study of interaction between robots and children. Image: CoEDL.
Image 1: Advisory Committee member Daan Van Esch (L) with TAP Program Manager Ben Foley (R) at a conference where they presented on Elpis. Image: CoEDL
Image 2: CoEDL Research Fellow Andrew Back explains features of the Florence Project during a showcase on people’s views of emerging technology. Image: CoEDL/University of Queensland.
Image 3: A sociogram of collaborations across CoEDL. Image: CoEDL.
[1] Angus, Daniel, Smith, Andrew, & Wiles, Janet (2012) Conceptual recurrence plots: Revealing patterns in human discourse. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(6), pp. 988-997. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2011.100
[2] Christina Atay, Erin Conway, Daniel Angus, Janet Wiles, Rosemary Baker, and Helen Chenery. December 10, 2015. "An Automated Approach to Examining Conversational Dynamics between People with Dementia and Their Carers." PLoS ONE. 10 (12): e0144327. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144327.
[3] Rosemary Baker, Daniel Angus, Erin Smith-Conway, Katherine Baker, Cindy Gallois, Andrew Smith, Janet Wiles, and Helen Chenery. 2015. "Visualising conversations between care home staff and residents with dementia." Ageing and Society. 35 (2): 270-297. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X13000640.
Ben Foley, Josh Arnold, Rolando Coto-Solano, Gautier Durantin, T. Mark Ellison, Daan van Esch, Scott Heath, František Kratochvíl, Zara Maxwell-Smith, David Nash, Ola Olsson, Mark Richards, Nay San, Hywel Stoakes, Nick Thieberger, and Janet Wiles. 2018. "Building Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)". In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages, 205-209. Gurugram, India.
David Ireland, Christina Atay, Jacki Liddle, Dana Bradford, Helen Lee, Olivia Rushin, Thomas Mullins, Daniel Angus, Janet Wiles, Simon McBride, and Adam Vogel. 2016. "Hello harlie: Enabling speech monitoring through chat-bot conversations". In Digital Health Innovation for Consumers, Clinicians, Connectivity and Community - Selected Papers from the 24th Australian National Health Informatics Conference, HIC 2016, 55-60. Melbourne, Australia.
Lydia Byrne, Daniel Angus, and Janet Wiles. 2015. "Acquired Codes of Meaning in Data Visualization and Infographics: Beyond Perceptual Primitives." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 22 (1): 509-518. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467321.
Rosemary Baker, Daniel Angus, Erin Smith-Conway, Katherine Baker, Cindy Gallois, Andrew Smith, Janet Wiles, and Helen Chenery. 2015. "Visualising conversations between care home staff and residents with dementia." Ageing and Society. 35 (2): 270-297. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X13000640.
Liddle, Jacki, Worthy, Peter, Frost, Dennis, Taylor, Eileen, Taylor, Dubhglas, Beleno, Ron, Angus, Daniel, Wiles, Janet, Angwin, Anthony, and The Florence Project Living Experience Expert Reference Group (2022). “Personal and complex: The needs and experiences related to technology use for people living with dementia”. Dementia 21 (5) 1-21.https://doi.org/10.1177/14713012221084521