The MELD Lab has several ongoing projects which are listed below.
Ongoing Projects
- MELDing the gap — Field linguists and computational linguists can work together toward more robust linguistic resources. However, more tools are needed to bridge the gap between their skill sets.
- Digital Language Consultancy — This consultancy provides online dictionary data services for members of endangered language communities. Online dictionary platforms have lowered barriers to uploading lexical resources, but preparing dictionary data can still be technically convoluted. If you have data and need assistance, or would like to volunteer in this project, click here.
- Machine learning in the field — Machine learning models can be trained to automatically predict linguistic analyses for new languages. But this does not benefit the ordinary working linguist if it is not in a format they are used to. Model predictions need to be converted to formats that can be imported to interfaces popular among linguists (e.g. FLEx and ELAN).
- Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South — A collaboration between Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), UF Department of Linguistics, and George A. Smathers Libraries, Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South (otherwise known as RGS or the African American Oral History Project (AAOH)) is an NEH and ACLS-funded collaborative project. The project’s foundation is the Joel Buchanan African American Oral History Archive, which is ongoing and currently contains over 1000 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, an underrepresented population in many other oral history collections. Contained within this archive are the stories of African Americans who lived through the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, the wars of the 20th Century, and the first Black presidency, along with the voices of those typically marginalized in the study of African American histories such as the Gullah-Geechee and Black Seminoles. This project emphasizes the aforementioned subjects and creates an environment for the extensive analysis of African American Language in the Gulf South (AALGS). The RGS project organizes these elements into a curriculum with enormous potential for educators and their students or in alternative educational environments such as teacher, adult, senior, or museum education programs. This collection of oral histories also allows for the linguistic analysis of AALGS and innovation regarding its inclusion within computational linguistics. One key goal of this project is to make these oral histories accessible to K-12 students and educators, which can be found here.
- Hoarding Language? — Clinicians in the UF Department of Psychiatry who diagnose people with hoarding disorder have reported they can predict whether someone will be diagnosed with this late onset mental disorder just by talking with them. Do they use language differently? If so, how? Can AI system diagnose hoarding through language before other symptoms have manifested? If you are interested in contributing to this project, please contact Dr. Sarah Moeller (smoeller@ufl.edu).