I'm Martijn Bartelds, a PhD candidate in the Computational Linguistics department at the University of Groningen, advised by Martijn Wieling and Mark Liberman.

My research focuses on developing and applying natural language processing methods to model resource-scarce languages. I am particularly interested in speech processing with extremely low-resource languages, dialects, and non-native speech.

Updates:

• I was awarded a Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds scholarship to visit Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania
• Our paper Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources was accepted at NAACL 2022
• Our paper Automated speech tools for helping communities process restricted-access corpora for language revival efforts was accepted at ComputEL-5
• Our paper Neural Representations for Modeling Variation in Speech was accepted at Journal of Phonetics
• Since October 2021, I am a visiting member of staff in Odette Scharenborg's lab at Delft University of Technology

E-mail: m.bartelds@rug.nl

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Publications

Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources

[GitHub] [Video] [Models]

Bartelds, M., & Wieling, M. (2022). Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources. Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

Automated speech tools for helping communities process restricted-access corpora for language revival efforts

[GitHub] [Video]

San, N., Bartelds, M., Ògúnrẹ̀mí, T., Mount, A., Thompson, R., Higgins, M., Barker, R., Simpson, J., & Jurafsky, D. (2022). Automated speech tools for helping communities process restricted-access corpora for language revival efforts. Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages 2022.

Neural Representations for Modeling Variation in Speech

[GitHub] [Demo]

Bartelds, M., de Vries, W., Sanal, F., Richter, C., Liberman, M., & Wieling, M. (2022). Neural Representations for Modeling Variation in Speech. Journal of Phonetics.

Leveraging Pre-Trained Representations to Improve Access to Untranscribed Speech from Endangered Languages

[GitHub] [Video]

*San, N., *Bartelds, M., Browne, M., Clifford, L., Gibson, F., Mansfield, J., ... & Jurafsky, D. (2021). Leveraging Pre-Trained Representations to Improve Access to Untranscribed Speech from Endangered Languages. IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU).

Adapting Monolingual Models: Data can be Scarce when Language Similarity is High

[GitHub] [Video]

*de Vries, W., *Bartelds, M., Nissim, M., & Wieling, M. (2021). Adapting Monolingual Models: Data can be Scarce when Language Similarity is High. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021.

A New Acoustic-Based Pronunciation Distance Measure

[GitHub]

Bartelds, M., Richter, C., Liberman, M., & Wieling, M. (2020). A New Acoustic-Based Pronunciation Distance Measure. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3, 39.

A novel paradigm to investigate phonetic convergence in interaction

Wieling, M., Tiede, M., Rebernik, T., de Jong, L., Braggaar, A., Bartelds, M., ... & Mills, G. (2020). A novel paradigm to investigate phonetic convergence in interaction. In Proceedings of the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production.

Measuring foreign accent strength using an acoustic distance measure

Bartelds, M., de Vries, W., Richter, C., Liberman, M., & Wieling, M. (2020). Measuring foreign accent strength using an acoustic distance measure. In Proceedings of the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production.

Highlighted Presentations

• Bartelds, M., & Wieling, M. (upcoming). Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources. Poster presentation at the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
• *de Vries, W., *Bartelds, M., Nissim, M., & Wieling, M. (2022). Language Similarity in Transfer Learning: the Case of POS Tagging for Gronings and West Frisian. Paper presentation at the Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands.
• Bartelds, M. (2022). Building speech and language technologies Dutch language varieties. Invited talk at the BAQONDE project for advancing the use of African languages in education.
• Bartelds, M. (2022). Speech technology for low-resource languages and dialects. Invited talk at the workshop on Low Saxon.
• *San, N., *Bartelds, M., Browne, M., Clifford, L., Gibson, F., Mansfield, J., ... & Jurafsky, D. (2021). Leveraging Pre-Trained Representations to Improve Access to Untranscribed Speech from Endangered Languages. Paper presented at the 2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU).
• San, N., Bartelds, M., & Jurafsky, D. (2021). Improving Access to Untranscribed Speech by Leveraging Spoken Term Detection and Self-supervised Learning of Speech Representations. Invited non-archival extended abstract presented at SigTyp 2021.
• Bartelds, M. (2021). Van Old noar Jong. Invited talk at the workshop on language diversity in education.
• Bartelds, M., de Vries, W., Richter, C., Liberman, M., & Wieling, M. (2020). Measuring foreign accent strength using an acoustic distance measure. Poster presented at the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production.
• Bartelds, M., & Wieling, M. (2020). Evaluating an Acoustic-based Pronunciation Distance Measure Against Human Perceptual Data. Poster presented at the 30th edition of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands.

Honors, Awards and Grants

• Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Scholarship (2022). Neural networks for modeling minority languages. Awarded €10,000.
• Co‑applicant CIT Data Science Grant (2020). Dialects of Groningen: from text to speech. Awarded €25,000.
• Co‑applicant Google Community Grant (2019). Van old noar jong: het digitaal doorgeven van Groningse streektaal en identiteit. Awarded €30,000.

Teaching

• Lecturer for the course Introduction to research methods (2022).
• Supervising research intern (2021).
• Supervising four bachelor thesis projects (2021).
• Supervised eight bachelor thesis projects (2020).
• Supervised two research interns (2020).
• Supervised five bachelor thesis projects (2019).
• Supervised research intern (2019).

Other Activities

• Developed (with Wieling, M.) a questionnaire study to investigate the use and the passing on of Low Saxon dialects within the Lifelines protocol cohort study (30 years longitudinal, data of 167.000 participants). Results expected in 2022.
• Developed a course (with Wieling, M.) for children in primary schools to introduce them to linguistic research using material from Low Saxon dialects (2021).
• Developed mobile application (with de Vries, W.) for children to make them more acquainted with their local dialect (2021). The mobile application is available in the Play Store and App store.
• Co-organized the 41st TABU Dag, an annual international broad linguistics conference in Groningen, the Netherlands (2021).
• Participated in the 10th Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS 2020).