PDF (Online Text) - EURAC

• Researchers should be able to address linguistic problems with linguistic
solutions.
Often, a linguistic problem, or a problem initially described in language terms
(e.g. retranscribing the data using a different phoneset) has to be redescribed in
programming terms before it can be addressed. Problems should be addressable in the
terms in which they occur.
• The toolkit should be increasingly simple to maintain and develop.
Over its lifetime, any toolkit increases in functionality: new problems occur and
new tasks become possible. If extensions are increasingly difficult to implement, the
toolkit eventually disintegrates (e.g. into a library of loosely-related scripts), becomes
impossible to maintain, and falls into disuse. A well-designed toolkit can avoid this
fate.
• The toolkit should encourage its own use and development.
It should be preferable to use the toolkit than to revert to the bad old ways.
Nevertheless, further use of the toolkit should stimulate researchers to confront it
with new problems, and to think of new areas in which the toolkit might be used.
If possible, the toolkit should be extensible by the researchers themselves, rather
than having to rely on a separate maintainer. In this case, the design of the toolkit
should promote the writing of readable, reusable code.
3. A Solution
3.1 Introduction
Our first (and current) attempt at a software artefact that meets these requirements
is the SpeechCluster package (Uemlianin 2005a). SpeechCluster is a collection of small
programs written in a programming language called Python. Python has a very clear,
readable syntax, and is especially suited for projects with several programmers, or
with novice programmers. As such, it suited our aim of encouraging non-programmers
to write their own tools.
The SpeechCluster package consists of a main SpeechCluster module with the basic
API, and a number of modules that can be used as command line tools. The tools are
intended to be used as such, but they can also be used as ‘examples’, or as a basis for
customisation or further programming with SpeechCluster.
Table 1 shows a list of the tools currently available as part of SpeechCluster: Below,
we look at two of these in more detail before exploring the use of SpeechCluster as an
API. Finally, we look at SpeechCluster in a larger system.
174