Language and Space Lab

We are the core unit of the URPP 'Language and Space' engaged in advancing a laboratory-style, interdisciplinary approach to language study. In three research groups — Video, Text, and Spatial Data Science — we analyse language artefacts, from unstructured video recordings to semi-structured text corpora and highly structured language databases. We study how space shapes our language, from individual interactions to global geographical patterns.

Lab director Peter Ranacher

SHARED RESOURCES

Finding linguistic contact areas
Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation
Does phylogeography work?
Detecting contact in linguistic phylogenetic trees
Text data and linguistic diversity
Subword text processing
Swiss German text processing
Text processing for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian (BCMS)
Tangram app
Empirical research methods in linguistics (teaching materials)

Finding linguistic contact areas

Duration	Funding	Lead
2019-2021	URPP "Language and Space"	Peter Ranacher

Code & data	sBayes: MCMC algorithms to identify linguistic contact zones

Read about the project and the results. Publications are listed on Peter Ranacher's personal page

Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation

Duration	Funding	Lead
2017-2021	URPP "Language and Space"	Peter Ranacher

Code & data	Music-language-genes

Read about the project and the result. Publications are listed on Peter Ranacher's personal page.

Does phylogeography work?

Duration	Funding	Lead
2018-2020	URPP "Language and Space"	Peter Ranacher

Code & data	Simulation, reconstruction and evaluation

Read about the project and the results. Publications are listed on Peter Ranacher's personal page.

Detecting contact in linguistic phylogenetic trees

Duration	Funding	Lead
2019-2022	URPP "Language and Space", UZH Graduate Campus grant	Peter Ranacher

Code & data	contacTrees Indo-European case study Simulation study

Code & data

contacTrees

Indo-European case study

Simulation study

Read about the project and the results. Publications are listed on Peter Ranacher's personal page.

Text data and linguistic diversity

Duration	Funding	Lead
2018-2022	SNSF	Tanja Samardžić

Code	TeDDi tools Analysis of language spaces Information theory measures over BPE merges Word unevenness index (coming soon)
Data	TeDDi Sample

Code

TeDDi tools

Analysis of language spaces

Information theory measures over BPE merges

Word unevenness index (coming soon)

Data

TeDDi Sample

Read about the project and the results

Subword text processing

Duration	Funding	Lead
2016-2020	URPP "Language and Space"	Tanja Samardžić

Code	Subword segmentation with synchronised decoding Interpretable reinflection Morphological reinflection CoNLL 2017 shared task winner

Read about the project and the results

Swiss German text processing

Duration	Funding	Lead
2014-2024	URPP "Language and Space", Industrial partners, partner projects (What's Up, Switzerland)	Tanja Samardžić

Code	Tools for processing the ArchiMob corpus Speech-to-text with Kaldi Speech-to-text with normalisation seq2seq normalisation with synchronised decoding seq2seq normalisation with synchronised decoding and POS tags
Data	ArchiMob Corpus Swiss German pronunciation dictionary Normalised Swiss German WhatsApp samples (Lusetti et al. 2018)

Code

Tools for processing the ArchiMob corpus

Speech-to-text with Kaldi

Speech-to-text with normalisation

seq2seq normalisation with synchronised decoding

seq2seq normalisation with synchronised decoding and POS tags

Data

ArchiMob Corpus

Swiss German pronunciation dictionary

Normalised Swiss German WhatsApp samples (Lusetti et al. 2018)

Publications are listed on Tanja Samardžić's personal page.