A major hurdle in data-driven research on typology is having sufficient data in many languages to draw meaningful conclusions. We present VoxClamantis v1.0, the first large-scale corpus for phonetic typology, with aligned segments and estimated phoneme-level labels in 690 readings spanning 635 languages, along with acoustic-phonetic measures of vowels and sibilants. Access to such data can greatly facilitate investigation of phonetic typology at a large scale and across many languages. However, it is non-trivial and computationally intensive to obtain such alignments for hundreds of languages, many of which have few to no resources presently available. We describe the methodology to create our corpus, discuss caveats with current methods and their impact on the utility of this data, and illustrate possible research directions through a series of case studies on the 48 highest-quality readings. Our corpus and scripts are publicly available for non-commercial use at https://voxclamantisproject.github.io.

We investigate the problem of searching for a lexeme-set in speech by searching for its inflectional variants. Experimental results indicate how lexeme-set search performance changes with the number of hypothesized inflections, while ablation experiments highlight the relative importance of different components in the lexeme-set search pipeline and the value of using curated inflectional paradigms. We provide a recipe and evaluation set for the community to use as an extrinsic measure of the performance of inflection generation approaches.

We report on adaptation of multilingual end-to-end speech recognition models trained on as many as 100 languages. Our findings shed light on the relative importance of similarity between the target and pretraining languages along the dimensions of phonetics, phonology, language family, geographical location, and orthography. In this context, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of two additional pretraining objectives in encouraging language-independent encoder representations: a context-independent phoneme objective paired with a language-adversarial classification objective.