AusTalk and Alveo : an Australian corpus and human communication science collaboration down under

Over the past decades, NLP has progressed from hand-crafted rule-based text processing systems to the widely accepted adoption of statistically-based systems. The convergence between techniques inspired by speech processing and detailed analyses embedded in formal linguistic frameworks continues to be negotiated, sometimes painfully, and the divide between empirical resource-intense and formal approaches can still be felt across our field. Michael Zock has always been a pioneer in building bridges across disciplines and he has endeavoured throughout his career to avoid being forced into one or another camp. As a colleague early in my own career, he has inspired and encouraged me in my own efforts at collaborating with related sub-disciplines and at approaching problems from new angles. In this paper, I describe two large-scale Australian projects that both resulted from cross-disciplinary collaboration and are expected to foster further research across a range of speech and language disciplines.