Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (9)
- Part of a Book (4)
- Article (3)
- Other (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (18)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (18)
Keywords
- Deutsch (14)
- Gesprochene Sprache (8)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (7)
- Annotation (3)
- Automatische Sprachanalyse (3)
- Regionalsprache (3)
- Standardsprache (3)
- Automatische Sprachproduktion (2)
- German (2)
- Metadaten (2)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (10)
- Postprint (2)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (5)
- Review-Status-unbekannt (4)
- Peer-Review (2)
Publisher
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (3)
- ISCA (2)
- Cambridge Scholars (1)
- Europäische Akademie (1)
- Franz Steiner Verlag (1)
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (1)
- Institut für deutsche Sprache (1)
- Institute of Cybernetics, Institute of the Estonian Language (1)
- Kluwer (1)
- The Association for Computational Linguistics (1)
Evaluating phonological status: significance of paradigm uniformity vs. prosodic grouping effects
(2007)
A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem.
The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-) standard German spoken by young and older educated adults, and to identify and locate the regional features. To this end, an extensive corpus of read and spontaneous speech is currently being compiled. German is a so-called pluricentric language. With our corpus we aim to determine whether national or regional standards really exist. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus will enable us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in the domain of the German standard language. The main focus of all research questions is on phonetic variation (lexical variation is only of minor interest). Read and spontaneous speech of four secondary school students (aged seventeen to twenty) and two fifty- to sixt-year-olds is recorded in 160 cities throughout the German-speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and word lists, name pictures, translate from English, and take part in a sociobiographic interview and a map task experiment. The resulting corpus will comprise over 1000 hours of orthographically and (in part) phonetically transcribed speech.
The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-)standard German spoken by young and older educated adults and to identify and locate regional features. To this end, we compile an areally extensive corpus of read and spontaneous German speech. Secondary school students and 50-to-60-year-old locals are recorded in 160 cities throughout the German speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and a word list, name pictures, translate words and sentences from English, answer questions in a sociobiographic interview, and take part in a map task experiment. The resulting corpus comprises over 1000 hours of speech, which is transcribed orthographically. Automatically derived broad phonetic transcriptions, selective manual narrow phonetic transcriptions, and variationalist annotations are added. Focussing on phonetic variation we aim to show to what extent national or regional standards exist in spoken German. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus enables us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in spoken (near-)standard German.
The metadata management system for speech corpora “memasysco” has been developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and is applied for the first time to document the speech corpus “German Today”. memasysco is based on a data model for the documentation of speech corpora and contains two generic XML schemas that drive data capture, XML native database storage, dynamic publishing, and information retrieval. The development of memasysco’s information architecture was mainly based on the ISLE MetaData Initiative (IMDI) guidelines for publishing metadata of linguistic resources. However, since we also have to support the corpus management process in research projects at the IDS, we need a finer atomic granularity for some documentation components as well as more restrictive categories to ensure data integrity. The XML metadata of different speech corpus projects are centrally validated and natively stored in an Oracle XML database. The extension of the system to the management of annotations of audio and video signals (e.g. orthographic and phonetic transcriptions) is planned for the near future.
We present an XML-based metadata standard for the documentation of speech and multimedia corpora that was developed at the Institute for German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The IDS is one of the major institutions providing German speech and language corpora to researchers. These corpora stem from many different sources and were previously documented in a rather heterogeneous fashion using a variety of data models and formats. In order to unify the documentation for existing and future corpora, the IDS- internal Archive for Spoken German collaborated with several projects and developed a set of standardised XML metadata schemas. These XML schemas build on existing internal and external documentation schemas (such as IMDI) and take into account the workflow of speech corpus production. In order to minimise redundancy, separate schemas were designed for projects, speakers, recording sessions, and entire corpora. The resulting schemas are tested in ongoing speech and multi-media projects at the IDS and are regularly revised. They are accompanied by element definitions, guidelines, and examples. In addition, a mapping to IMDI will be provided.
We present the annotation of information structure in the MULI project. To learn more about the information structuring means in prosody, syntax and discourse, theory- independent features were defined for each level. We describe the features and illustrate them on an example sentence. To investigate the interplay of features, the representation has to allow for inspecting all three layers at the same time. This is realised by a stand-off XML mark-up with the word as the basic unit. The theory-neutral XML stand-off annotation allows integrating this resource with other linguistic resources such as the Tiger Treebank for German or the Penn treebank for English.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in listeners' preferences. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of symbolic strings which were either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic string is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, "post-lexical" segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to calculate an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.