Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (22)
- Part of a Book (15)
- Article (12)
- Working Paper (2)
- Preprint (1)
Language
- English (52) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (52) (remove)
Keywords
- Gesprochene Sprache (52) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (31)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (14)
- Postprint (6)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (41)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (4)
- Peer-review (1)
Publisher
- European Language Resources Association (5)
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (5)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (3)
- Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. (3)
- Linköping University Electronic Press (3)
- Springer (3)
- Benjamins (2)
- Buske (2)
- CLARIN (2)
- German Society for Computational Linguistics & Language Technology und Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (2)
This paper presents a short insight into a new project at the "Institute for the German Language” (IDS) (Mannheim). It gives an insight into some basic ideas for a corpus-based dictionary of spoken German, which will be developed and compiled by the new project "The Lexicon of spoken German” (Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe). The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German” (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK), which is implemented in the "Database for Spoken German” (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD). Both resources, the database and the corpus, have been developed at the IDS.
This paper presents the prototype of a lexicographic resource for spoken German in interaction, which was conceived within the framework of the LeGeDe-project (LeGeDe=Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch). First of all, it summarizes the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used for the initial planning of the resource. The headword candidates were selected by analyzing corpus-based data. Therefore, the data of two corpora (written and spoken German) were compared with quantitative methods. The information that was gathered on the selected headword candidates can be assigned to two different sections: meanings and functions in interaction.
Additionally, two studies on the expectations of future users towards the resource were carried out. The results of these two studies were also taken into account in the development of the prototype. Focusing on the presentation of the resource’s content, the paper shows both the different lexicographical information in selected dictionary entries, and the information offered by the provided hyperlinks and external texts. As a conclusion, it summarizes the most important innovative aspects that were specifically developed for the implementation of such a resource.
We present a descriptive analysis on the two datasets from the shared task on Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS), the only existing German dataset for opinion role extraction of its size. Our analysis discusses the individual properties of the three components, subjective expressions, sources and targets and their relations towards each other. Our observations should help practitioners and researchers when building a system to extract opinion roles from German data.
We present a study on gaps in spoken language interaction as a potential candidate for syntactic boundaries. On the basis of an online annotation experiment, we can show that there is an effect of gap duration and gap type on its likelihood of being a syntactic boundary. We discuss the potential of these findings for an automation of the segmentation process.
A syntax-based scheme for the annotation and segmentation of German spoken language interactions
(2018)
Unlike corpora of written language where segmentation can mainly be derived from orthographic punctuation marks, the basis for segmenting spoken language corpora is not predetermined by the primary data, but rather has to be established by the corpus compilers. This impedes consistent querying and visualization of such data. Several ways of segmenting have been proposed,
some of which are based on syntax. In this study, we developed and evaluated annotation and segmentation guidelines in reference to the topological field model for German. We can show that these guidelines are used consistently across annotators. We also investigated the influence of various interactional settings with a rather simple measure, the word-count per segment and unit-type. We observed that the word count and the distribution of each unit type differ in varying interactional settings and that our developed segmentation and annotation guidelines are used consistently across annotators. In conclusion, our syntax-based segmentations reflect interactional properties that are intrinsic to the social interactions that participants are involved in. This can be used for further analysis of social interaction and opens the possibility for automatic segmentation of transcripts.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
CLARIN contractual framework for sharing language data: the perspective of personal data protection
(2020)
The article analyses the responsibility for ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in research settings. As a general rule, organisations are considered the data controller (responsible party for the GDPR compliance). Research constitutes a unique setting influenced by academic freedom. This raises the question of whether academics could be considered the controller as well. However, there are some court cases and policy documents on this issue. It is not settled yet. The analysis serves a preliminary analytical background for redesigning CLARIN contractual framework for sharing data.
We present web services which implement a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following the TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 “Language resource management – Transcription of spoken language”. The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
We present web services implementing a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 "Language resource management - Transcription of spoken language". The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
We present an approach to making existing CLARIN web services usable for spoken language transcriptions. Our approach is based on a new TEI-based ISO standard for such transcriptions. We show how existing tool formats can be transformed to this standard, how an encoder/decoder pair for the TCF format enables users to feed this type of data through a WebLicht tool chain, and why and how web services operating directly on the standard format would be useful.
Except for some recent advances in spoken language lexicography (cf. Verdonik & Sepesy Maučec 2017, Hansen & Hansen 2012, Siepmann 2015), traditional lexicographic work is mainly oriented towards the written language. In this paper, we describe a method we used to identify relevant headword candidates for a lexicographic resource for spoken language that is currently being developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS, Mannheim). We describe the challenges of the headword selection for a dictionary of spoken language, and having made considerations regarding our headword concept, we present the corpus-based procedures that we used in order to facilitate the headword selection. After presenting the results regarding the selection of one-word lemmas, we discuss the opportunities and limitations of our approach.
Speech islands are historically and developmentally unique and will inevitably disappear within the next decades. We urgently need to preserve their remains and exploit what is left in order to make research on language-in-contact and historical as well as current comparative language research possible.
The Archive for Spoken German (AGD) at the Institute for German Language collects, fosters and archives data from completed research projects and makes them available to the wider research community.
Besides large variation corpora and corpora of conversational speech, the archive already contains a range of collections of data on German speech minorities. The latter will be outlined in this chapter. Some speech island data is already made available through the personal service of the AGD, or the database of spoken German (DGD), e.g. data on Australian German, Unserdeutsch, or German in North America. Some corpora are still being prepared for publication, but still important to document for potentially interested research projects. We therefore also explain the current problems and efforts related to the curation of speech island data, from the digitization of recordings and the collection of metadata, to the integration of transcriptions, annotations and other ways of accessing and sharing data.
Automatic division of spoken language transcripts into sentence-like units is a challenging problem, caused by disfluencies, ungrammatical structures and the lack of punctuation. We present experiments on dividing up German spoken dialogues where we investigate the impact of task setup and data representation, encoding of context information as well as different model architectures for this task.
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
We present a fine-grained NER annotations scheme with 30 labels and apply it to German data. Building on the OntoNotes 5.0 NER inventory, our scheme is adapted for a corpus of transcripts of biographic interviews by adding categories for AGE and LAN(guage) and also adding label classes for various numeric and temporal expressions. Applying the scheme to the spoken data as well as a collection of teaser tweets from newspaper sites, we can confirm its generality for both domains, also achieving good inter-annotator agreement. We also show empirically how our inventory relates to the well-established 4-category NER inventory by re-annotating a subset of the GermEval 2014 NER coarse-grained dataset with our fine label inventory. Finally, we use a BERT-based system to establish some baselines for NER tagging on our two new datasets. Global results in in-domain testing are quite high on the two datasets, near what was achieved for the coarse inventory on the CoNLLL2003 data. Cross-domain testing produces much lower results due to the severe domain differences.
In this paper, we present a GOLD standard of part-of-speech tagged transcripts of spoken German. The GOLD standard data consists of four annotation layers – transcription (modified orthography), normalization (standard orthography), lemmatization and POS tags – all of which have undergone careful manual quality control. It comes with guidelines for the manual POS annotation of transcripts of German spoken data and an extended version of the STTS (Stuttgart Tübingen Tagset) which accounts for phenomena typically found in spontaneous spoken German. The GOLD standard was developed on the basis of the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, FOLK, and is, to our knowledge, the first such dataset based on a wide variety of spontaneous and authentic interaction types. It can be used as a basis for further development of language technology and corpus linguistic applications for German spoken language.
The possibilities of re-use and archiving of spoken and written corpora are affected by personality rights (depending on legal tradition also called: the right of publicity), copyright law and data protection / privacy laws. These recommendations include information about legal aspects which should be considered while creating corpora to ensure the greatest archivability and re-usability possible in compliance with current laws.
The information compiled here shall serve researchers who plan to create corpora or who are involved in evaluation of such measures as a guideline. This information is not exhaustive or to be considered as legal advice. Researchers should consult institutional legal departments and management before making legally relevant decisions. That said, further legal expertise should be sought if possible as early as project planning phases.
Smooth turn-taking in conversation depends in part on speakers being able to communicate their intention to hold or cede the floor. Both prosodic and gestural cues have been shown to be used in this context. We investigate the interplay of pitch movements and hand gestures at locations at which speaker change becomes relevant, comparing their use in German and Swedish. We find that there are some shared functions of prosody and gesture with regard to turn-taking in the two languages, but that these shared functions appear to be mediated by the different phonological demands on pitch in the two languages.
This paper presents experiments on sentence boundary detection in transcripts of spoken dialogues. Segmenting spoken language into sentence-like units is a challenging task, due to disfluencies, ungrammatical or fragmented structures and the lack of punctuation. In addition, one of the main bottlenecks for many NLP applications for spoken language is the small size of the training data, as the transcription and annotation of spoken language is by far more time-consuming and labour-intensive than processing written language. We therefore investigate the benefits of data expansion and transfer learning and test different ML architectures for this task. Our results show that data expansion is not straightforward and even data from the same domain does not always improve results. They also highlight the importance of modelling, i.e. of finding the best architecture and data representation for the task at hand. For the detection of boundaries in spoken language transcripts, we achieve a substantial improvement when framing the boundary detection problem as a sentence pair classification task, as compared to a sequence tagging approach.
Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.
This paper discusses the technological and methodological challenges in creating and sharing HAMATAC, the Hamburg Map Task Corpus. The first version of the corpus, consisting of 24 recordings with orthographic transcriptions and metadata, is publicly available. A second version featuring different types of linguistic annotation is in progress. I will describe how the various software tools and data formats of the EXMARaLDA system were used for transcription and multi-level annotation, to compile recordings and transcriptions into a corpus and manage metadata, to publish the corpus, and how they can be used for carrying out corpus queries (KWIC) and analyses. Some recurrent issues in corpus building and sharing and the interaction of technological and methodological aspects will be illustrated using HAMATAC.
I’ve got a construction looks funny – representing and recovering non-standard constructions in UD
(2020)
The UD framework defines guidelines for a crosslingual syntactic analysis in the framework of dependency grammar, with the aim of providing a consistent treatment across languages that not only supports multilingual NLP applications but also facilitates typological studies. Until now, the UD framework has mostly focussed on bilexical grammatical relations. In the paper, we propose to add a constructional perspective and discuss several examples of spoken-language constructions that occur in multiple languages and challenge the current use of basic and enhanced UD relations. The examples include cases where the surface relations are deceptive, and syntactic amalgams that either involve unconnected subtrees or structures with multiply-headed dependents. We argue that a unified treatment of constructions across languages will increase the consistency of the UD annotations and thus the quality of the treebanks for linguistic analysis.
Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
This paper gives an insight into the basic concepts for a corpus-based lexical resource of spoken German, which is being developed by the project "The Lexicon of Spoken German"(Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe) at the "Institute for the German Language" (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, IDS) in Mannheim. The focus of the paper is on initial ideas of semi-automatic and automatic resources that assist the quantitative analysis of the corpus data for the creation of dictionary content. The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German" (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK).
Metalinguistic awareness of standard vs standard usage. The case of determiners in spoken German
(2015)
This paper explores speakers’ notions of the situational appropriacy of linguistic variants. We conducted a web-based survey in which we collected ratings of the appropriacy of variants of linguistic variables in spoken German. A range of quantitative methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and various forms of visualization techniques) is applied in order to analyze metalinguistic awareness and the differences in the evaluation of written vs. spoken stimuli. First, our data show that speakers’ ratings of the appropriacy of linguistic variants vary reliably with two rough clusters representing formal and informal speech situations and genres. The findings confirm that speakers adhere to a notion of spoken standard German which takes genre and register-related variation into account. Secondly, our analysis reveals a written language bias: metalinguistic awareness is strongly influenced by the physical mode of the presentation of linguistic items (spoken vs. written).
Notions such as “corpus-driven” versus “theory-driven” bring into focus the specific role of corpora in linguistic research. As for phonology with its intrinsic focus on abstract categorical representation, there is a question of how a strictly corpus-driven approach can yield insight into relevant structures. Here we argue for a more theory-driven approach to phonology based on the concept of a phonological grammar in terms of interacting constraints. Empirical validation of such grammars comes from the potential convergence of the evidence from various sources including typological data, neutralization patterns, and in particular patterns observed in the creative use of language such as acronym formation, loanword adaptation, poetry, and speech errors. Further empirical validation concerns specific predictions regarding phonetic differences among opposition members, paradigm uniformity effects, and phonetic implementation in given segmental and prosodic contexts. Corpora in the narrowest sense (i.e. “raw” data consisting of spontaneous speech produced in natural settings) are useful for testing these predictions, but even here, special purpose-built corpora are often necessary.
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
This article describes the development of the digital infrastructure at a research data centre for audio-visual linguistic research data, the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, over the past ten years. The typical resource hosted in the HZSK Repository, the core component of the infrastructure, is a collection of recordings with time-aligned transcripts and additional contextual data, a spoken language corpus. Since the centre has a thematic focus on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and provides its service to researchers within linguistics and other disciplines, the development of the infrastructure was driven by diverse usage scenarios and user needs on the one hand, and by the common technical requirements for certified service centres of the CLARIN infrastructure on the other. Beyond the technical details, the article also aims to be a contribution to the discussion on responsibilities and services within emerging digital research data infrastructures and the fundamental issues in sustainability of research software engineering, concluding that in order to truly cater to user needs across the research data lifecycle, we still need to bridge the gap between discipline-specific research methods in the process of digitalisation and generic digital research data management approaches.
In this paper, we address two problems in indexing and querying spoken language corpora with overlapping speaker contributions. First, we look into how token distance and token precedence can be measured when multiple primary data streams are available and when transcriptions happen to be tokenized, but are not synchronized with the sound at the level of individual tokens. We propose and experiment with a speaker based search mode that enables any speaker’s transcription tier to be the basic tokenization layer whereby the contributions of other speakers are mapped to this given tier. Secondly, we address two distinct methods of how speaker overlaps can be captured in the TEI based ISO Standard for Spoken Language Transcriptions (ISO 24624:2016) and how they can be queried by MTAS – an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying text with multilevel annotations. We illustrate the problems, introduce possible solutions and discuss their benefits and drawbacks.
We present a method for detecting and reconstructing separated particle verbs in a corpus of spoken German by following an approach suggested for written language. Our study shows that the method can be applied successfully to spoken language, compares different ways of dealing with structures that are specific to spoken language corpora, analyses some remaining problems, and discusses ways of optimising precision or recall for the method. The outlook sketches some possibilities for further work in related areas.
The QUEST (QUality ESTablished) project aims at ensuring the reusability of audio-visual datasets (Wamprechtshammer et al., 2022) by devising quality criteria and curating processes. RefCo (Reference Corpora) is an initiative within QUEST in collaboration with DoReCo (Documentation Reference Corpus, Paschen et al. (2020)) focusing on language documentation projects. Previously, Aznar and Seifart (2020) introduced a set of quality criteria dedicated to documenting fieldwork corpora. Based on these criteria, we establish a semi-automatic review process for existing and work-in-progress corpora, in particular for language documentation. The goal is to improve the quality of a corpus by increasing its reusability. A central part of this process is a template for machine-readable corpus documentation and automatic data verification based on this documentation. In addition to the documentation and automatic verification, the process involves a human review and potentially results in a RefCo certification of the corpus. For each of these steps, we provide guidelines and manuals. We describe the evaluation process in detail, highlight the current limits for automatic evaluation and how the manual review is organized accordingly.
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.
This article discusses questions concerning the creation, annotation and sharing of spoken language corpora. We use the Hamburg Map Task Corpus (HAMATAC), a small corpus in which advanced learners of German were recorded solving a map task, as an example to illustrate our main points. We first give an overview of the corpus creation and annotation process including recording, metadata documentation, transcription and semi-automatic annotation of the data. We then discuss the manual annotation of disfluencies as an example case in which many of the typical and challenging problems for data reuse – in particular the reliability of interpretative annotations – are revealed.
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.
The lexicography of German
(2020)
This chapter discusses the main dictionaries of the German language as it is spoken and written in Germany, and also German as it is spoken and written in Austria, Switzerland, the eastern fringes of Belgium, and South Tyrol. It also briefly describes Pennsylvania German. Corpora and other language resources used in German dictionary-making are also presented. Finally, there is a discussion of some current issues in German lexicography, as well as future prospects.
This paper presents the corpus-based lexicographical prototype that was developed within the framework of the project Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch (=LeGeDe) as a thirdparty funded project. Research results regarding the information offered in dictionaries have shown that there is a necessity for information on spoken lexis and its interactional functions. The resulting LeGeDe-prototype is based on these needs and desiderata and is thus an innovative example for the adequate representation of spoken language in online dictionaries. It is available online since September 2019 (https://www.owid.de/legede/). In the following sections, after first focusing on the presentation of the project’s goals, the data basis, the intended end user, and the applied methods, we will illustrate the microstructure of the prototype and the information provided in a dictionary entry based on the lemma eben. Finally, we will summarize innovative aspects that are important for the implementation of such a resource.
This contribution investigates the use of the Czech particle jako (“like”/“as”) in naturally occurring conversations. Inspired by interactional research on unfinished or suspended utterances and on turn-final conjunctions and particles, the analysis aims to trace the possible development of jako from conjunction to a tag-like particle that can be exploited for mobilizing affiliative responses. Traditionally, jako has been described as conjunction used for comparing two elements or for providing a specification of a first element [“X (is) like Y”]. In spoken Czech, however, jako can be flexibly positioned within a speaking turn and does not seem to operate as a coordinating or hypotactic conjunction. As a result, prior studies have described jako as a polyfunctional particle. This article will try to shed light on the meaning of jako in spoken discourse by focusing on its apparent fuzzy or “filler” uses, i.e., when it is found in a mid-turn position in multi-unit turns and in the immediate vicinity of hesitations, pauses, and turn suspensions. Based on examples from mundane, video-recorded conversations and on a sequential and multimodal approach to social interaction, the analyses will first show that jako frequently frames discursive objects that co-participants should respond to. By using jako before a pause and concurrently adopting specific embodied displays, participants can more explicitly seek to mobilize responsive action. Moreover, as jako tends to cluster in multi-unit turns involving the formulation of subjective experience or stance, it can be shown to be specifically designed for mobilizing affiliative responses. Finally, it will be argued that the potential of jako to open up interactive turn spaces can be linked to the fundamental comparative semantics of the original conjunction.
"FOLK is the ""Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK)"" (eng.: research and teaching corpus of spoken German). The project has set itself the aim of building a corpus of German conversations which a) covers a broad range of interaction types in private, institutional and public settings, b) is sufficiently large and diverse and of sufficient quality to support different qualitative and quantitative research approaches, c) is transcribed, annotated and made accessible according to current technological standards, and d) is available to the scientific community on a sound legal basis and without unnecessary restrictions of usage. This paper gives an overview of the corpus design, the strategies for acquisition of a diverse range of interaction data, and the corpus construction workflow from recording via transcription an annotation to dissemination."
This paper describes the TEI-based ISO standard 24624:2016 ‘Transcription of spoken language’ and other formats used within CLARIN for spoken language resources. It assesses the current state of support for the standard and the interoperability between these formats and with rele- vant tools and services. The main idea behind the paper is that a digital infrastructure providing language resources and services to researchers should also allow the combined use of resources and/or services from different contexts. This requires syntactic and semantic interoperability. We propose a solution based on the ISO/TEI format and describe the necessary steps for this format to work as an exchange format with basic semantic interoperability for spoken language resources across the CLARIN infrastructure and beyond.
Researchers interested in the sounds of speech or the physical gestures of Speakers make use of audio and video recordings in their work. Annotating these recordings presents a different set of requirements to the annotation of text. Special purpose tools have been developed to display video and audio Signals and to allow the creation of time-aligned annotations. This chapter reviews the most widely used of these tools for both manual and automatic generation of annotations on multimodal data.
This paper describes the development of a systematic approach to the creation, management and curation of linguistic resources, particularly spoken language corpora. It also presents first steps towards a framework for continuous quality control to be used within external research projects by non-technical users, and discuss various domain and discipline specific problems and individual solutions. The creation of spoken language corpora is not only a time-consuming and costly process, but the created resources often represent intangible cultural heritage, containing recordings of, for example, extinct languages or historical events. Since high quality resources are needed to enable re-use in as many future contexts as possible, researchers need to be provided with the necessary means for quality control. We believe that this includes methods and tools adapted to Humanities researchers as non-technical users, and that these methods and tools need to be developed to support existing tasks and goals of research projects.
In this paper, we describe a data processing pipeline used for annotated spoken corpora of Uralic languages created in the INEL (Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages) project. With this processing pipeline we convert the data into a loss-less standard format (ISO/TEI) for long-term preservation while simultaneously enabling a powerful search in this version of the data. For each corpus, the input we are working with is a set of files in EXMARaLDA XML format, which contain transcriptions, multimedia alignment, morpheme segmentation and other kinds of annotation. The first step of processing is the conversion of the data into a certain subset of TEI following the ISO standard ’Transcription of spoken language’ with the help of an XSL transformation. The primary purpose of this step is to obtain a representation of our data in a standard format, which will ensure its long-term accessibility. The second step is the conversion of the ISO/TEI files to a JSON format used by the “Tsakorpus” search platform. This step allows us to make the corpora available through a web-based search interface. As an addition, the existence of such a converter allows other spoken corpora with ISO/TEI annotation to be made accessible online in the future.
This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
As a part of the ZuMult-project, we are currently modelling a backend architecture that should provide query access to corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (AGD) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS). We are exploring how to reuse existing search engine frameworks providing full text indices and allowing to query corpora by one of the corpus query languages (QLs) established and actively used in the corpus research community. For this purpose, we tested MTAS - an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying on text with multilevel annotations. We applied MTAS on three oral corpora stored in the TEI-based ISO standard for transcriptions of spoken language (ISO 24624:2016). These corpora differ from the corpus data that MTAS was developed for, because they include interactions with two and more speakers and are enriched, inter alia, with timeline-based annotations. In this contribution, we report our test results and address issues that arise when search frameworks originally developed for querying written corpora are being transferred into the field of spoken language.