Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (44)
- Part of a Book (24)
- Article (20)
- Working Paper (3)
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (93) (remove)
Keywords
- Gesprochene Sprache (93) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (53)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (19)
- Postprint (10)
- Erstveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (54)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (16)
- Review-Status-unbekannt (2)
- Peer-review (1)
Publisher
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (10)
- European Language Resources Association (9)
- Benjamins (6)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (5)
- Springer (4)
- Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. (3)
- Linköping University Electronic Press (3)
- Buske (2)
- CLARIN (2)
- German Society for Computational Linguistics & Language Technology und Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (2)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
In German oral discourse, previous research has shown that okay can be used both as a response token (e.g., for agreeing with the previous turn or for claiming a certain degree of understanding) and as a discourse marker (e.g., for closing conversational topics or sequences and/or indicating transitions). This contribution focuses on the use of okay as a response token and how it is connected with the speakers’ interactional state of knowledge (their understanding, their assumptions etc.). The analysis is based on video recorded everyday conversations in German and a sequential, micro-analytic approach (multimodal conversation analysis). The main function of conversational okay in the selected data set is related to indicating the acceptance of prior information. By okay, speakers however claim acceptance of a piece of information that they can’t verify or check. The analysis contrasts different sequences containing okay only with sequences in which change-of-state tokens such as ah and achso co-occur with okay. This illustrates that okay itself does not index prior information as new, and that it is not used for agreeing with or for confirming prior information. Instead it enables the speaker to adopt a kind of neutral, “non-agreeing” position towards a given piece of information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since Lerner coined the notion of delayed completion in 1989, this recurrent social practice of continuing one’s speaking turn while disregarding an intermediate co-participant’s utterance has not been investigated with regard to embodied displays and actions. A sequential approach to videotaped mundane conversations in German will explain the occurrence and use of delayed completions. First, especially in multi-party and multi-activity settings, delayed completions can result from reduced monitoring and coordinating activities. Second, recipients can use intra-turn response slots for more extended responsive actions than the current speaker initially projected, leading to delayed completion sequences. Finally, delayed completions are used for blocking possibly misaligned co-participant actions. The investigation of visible action illustrates that delayed completions are a basic practice for retrospectively managing co-participant response slots.
This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions (Vorreiter 2003; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), our initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the necessity of analysing syntactic phenomena within their specific action contexts.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This paper is about the workflow for construction and dissemination of FOLK (Forschungs - und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch – Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German), a large corpus of authentic spoken interaction data, recorded on audio and video. Section 2 describes in detail the tools used in the individual steps of transcription, anonymization, orthographic normalization, lemmatization and POS tagging of the data, as well as some utilities used for corpus management. Section 3 deals with the DGD (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch - Database of Spoken German) as a tool for distributing completed data sets and making them available for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In section 4, some plans for further development are sketched.
The IFCASL corpus is a French-German bilingual phonetic learner corpus designed, recorded and annotated in a project on individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning. The motivation for setting up this corpus was that there is no phonetically annotated and segmented corpus for this language pair of comparable of size and coverage. In contrast to most learner corpora, the IFCASL corpus incorporate data for a language pair in both directions, i.e. in our case French learners of German, and German learners of French. In addition, the corpus is complemented by two sub-corpora of native speech by the same speakers. The corpus provides spoken data by about 100 speakers with comparable productions, annotated and segmented on the word and the phone level, with more than 50% manually corrected data. The paper reports on inter-annotator agreement and the optimization of the acoustic models for forced speech-text alignment in exercises for computer-assisted pronunciation training. Example studies based on the corpus data with a phonetic focus include topics such as the realization of /h/ and glottal stop, final devoicing of obstruents, vowel quantity and quality, pitch range, and tempo.
The current paper presents a corpus containing 35 dialogues of spontaneously spoken southern German, including half an hour of articulography for 13 of the speakers. Speakers were seated in separate recording chambers, mimicking a telephone call, and recorded on individual audio channels. The corpus provides manually corrected word boundaries and automatically aligned segment boundaries. Annotations are provided in the Praat format. In addition to audio recordings, speakers filled out a detailed questionnaire, assessing among others their audio-visual consumption habits.
There have been several attempts to annotate communicative functions to utterances of verbal feedback in English previously. Here, we suggest an annotation scheme for verbal and non-verbal feedback utterances in French including the categories base, attitude, previous and visual. The data comprises conversations, maptasks and negotiations from which we extracted ca. 13,000 candidate feedback utterances and gestures. 12 students were recruited for the annotation campaign of ca. 9,500 instances. Each instance was annotated by between 2 and 7 raters. The evaluation of the annotation agreement resulted in an average best-pair kappa of 0.6. While the base category with the values acknowledgement, evaluation, answer, elicit and other achieves good agreement, this is not the case for the other main categories. The data sets, which also include automatic extractions of lexical, positional and acoustic features, are freely available and will further be used for machine learning classification experiments to analyse the form-function relationship of feedback.
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.
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.
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).
Annotating Discourse Relations in Spoken Language: A Comparison of the PDTB and CCR Frameworks
(2016)
In discourse relation annotation, there is currently a variety of different frameworks being used, and most of them have been developed and employed mostly on written data. This raises a number of questions regarding interoperability of discourse relation annotation schemes, as well as regarding differences in discourse annotation for written vs. spoken domains. In this paper, we describe ouron annotating two spoken domains from the SPICE Ireland corpus (telephone conversations and broadcast interviews) according todifferent discourse annotation schemes, PDTB 3.0 and CCR. We show that annotations in the two schemes can largely be mappedone another, and discuss differences in operationalisations of discourse relation schemes which present a challenge to automatic mapping. We also observe systematic differences in the prevalence of implicit discourse relations in spoken data compared to written texts,find that there are also differences in the types of causal relations between the domains. Finally, we find that PDTB 3.0 addresses many shortcomings of PDTB 2.0 wrt. the annotation of spoken discourse, and suggest further extensions. The new corpus has roughly theof the CoNLL 2015 Shared Task test set, and we hence hope that it will be a valuable resource for the evaluation of automatic discourse relation labellers.
The paper presents practices in the compilation of FOLK, the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, a large collection of spontaneous verbal interaction from diverse discourse domains. After introducing the aims and organisational circumstances of the construction of FOLK, the general idea discussed is that good practices cannot be developed without considering methodological, technological and organisational aspects on equal footing. Starting from this idea, this paper inspects more closely some actual practices in FOLK, namely the handling of legal (especially privacy protection) issues, the decisions taken for the transcription and annotation workflow, and the question of how to best disseminate a corpus like FOLK. The final section sketches some possible future improvements for practices in FOLK.
Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of all linguistic theories that take social interaction involving language into account. However, determining communicative functions is a notoriously difficult task both for human interpreters and systems. It involves an interpretative process that integrates various sources of information. Existing work on communicative function classification comes from either dialogue act tagging where it is generally coarse grained concerning the feed- back phenomena or it is token-based and does not address the variety of forms that feed- back utterances can take. This paper introduces an annotation framework, the dataset and the related annotation campaign (involving 7 raters to annotate nearly 6000 utterances). We present its evaluation not merely in terms of inter-rater agreement but also in terms of usability of the resulting reference dataset both from a linguistic research perspective and from a more applicative viewpoint.
Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing.
In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.
Metalinguistic awareness of standard vs standard usage. The case of determiners in spoken German
(2015)
Designing a Bilingual Speech Corpus for French and German Language Learners: a Two-Step Process
(2014)
We present the design of a corpus of native and non-native speech for the language pair French-German, with a special emphasis on phonetic and prosodic aspects. To our knowledge there is no suitable corpus, in terms of size and coverage, currently available for the target language pair. To select the target L1-L2 interference phenomena we prepare a small preliminary corpus (corpus1), which is analyzed for coverage and cross-checked jointly by French and German experts. Based on this analysis, target phenomena on the phonetic and phonological level are selected on the basis of the expected degree of deviation from the native performance and the frequency of occurrence. 14 speakers performed both L2 (either French or German) and L1 material (either German or French). This allowed us to test, recordings duration, recordings material, the performance of our automatic aligner software. Then, we built corpus2 taking into account what we learned about corpus1. The aims are the same but we adapted speech material to avoid too long recording sessions. 100 speakers will be recorded. The corpus (corpus1 and corpus2) will be prepared as a searchable database, available for the scientific community after completion of the project.
This paper analyses paramedic emergency interaction as multimodal multiactivity. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of emergency drills performed by professional paramedics during advanced training, the focus is on paramedics’ participation in multiple joint projects which become simultaneously relevant. Simultaneity and fast succession of multiactivity does not only characterise work on the team level, but also the work profile of the individual paramedic. Participants have to coordinate their own participation in more than one joint project intrapersonally. In the data studied, three patterns of allocating multimodal resources stood out as routine ways of coordinating participation in two simultaneous projects intrapersonally:
1. Talk and hearing vs. manual action monitored by gaze,
2. Talk and hearing vs. gazing (and pointing),
3. Manual action vs. gaze (and talk and hearing).
This paper introduces the Aix Map Task corpus, a corpus of audio and video recordings of task-oriented dialogues. It was modelled after the original HCRC Map Task corpus. Lexical material was designed for the analysis of speech and prosody, as described in Astésano et al. (2007). The design of the lexical material, the protocol and some basic quantitative features of the existing corpus are presented. The corpus was collected under two communicative conditions, one audio-only condition and one face-to-face condition. The recordings took place in a studio and a sound attenuated booth respectively, with head-set microphones (and in the face-to-face condition with two video cameras). The recordings have been segmented into Inter-Pausal-Units and transcribed using transcription conventions containing actual productions and canonical forms of what was said. It is made publicly available online.
This paper presents the first release of the KiezDeutsch Korpus (KiDKo), a new language resource with multiparty spoken dialogues of Kiezdeutsch, a newly emerging language variety spoken by adolescents from multi-ethnic urban areas in Germany. The first release of the corpus includes the transcriptions of the data as well as a normalisation layer and part-of-speech annotations. In the paper, we describe the main features of the new resource and then focus on automatic POS tagging of informal spoken language. Our tagger achieves an accuracy of nearly 97% on KiDKo. While we did not succeed in further improving the tagger using ensemble tagging, we present our approach to using the tagger ensembles for identifying error patterns in the automatically tagged data.
Annotating Spoken Language
(2014)
"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."
The goal of the present chapter is to explore the possibility of providing the research (but also the industrial) community that commonly uses spoken corpora with a stable portfolio of well-documented standardized formats that allow a high reuse rate of annotated spoken resources and, as a consequence, better interoperability across tools used to produce or exploit such resources.
This document presents ongoing work related to spoken language data within a project that aims to establish a common and unified infrastructure for the sustainable provision of linguistic primary research data at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In furtherance of its mission to “document the German language as it is currently used”, the project expects to enable the research community to access a broad empirical base of working material via a single platform. While the goal is to eventually cover all linguistically relevant digital resources of the IDS, including lexicographic information systems such as the IDS German Vocabulary Portal, OWID, written language corpora such as the IDS German Reference Corpus, DeReKo, and spoken language corpora such as the IDS German Speech Corpus for Research and Teaching, FOLK, the work presented here predominantly focuses on the latter type of data, i.e. speech corpora. Within this context, the present document pictures the project’s contributions to the development of standards and best practice guidelines concerning data storage, process documentation and legal issues for the sustainable preservation and long-term accessibility of primary linguistic research data.
This paper presents an extension to the Stuttgart-Tübingen TagSet, the standard part-of-speech tag set for German, for the annotation of spoken language. The additional tags deal with hesitations, backchannel signals, interruptions, onomatopoeia and uninterpretable material. They allow one to capture phenomena specific to spoken language while, at the same time, preserving inter-operability with already existing corpora of written language.
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 presents the concept of the "participant perspective" as an approach to the study of spoken language. It discusses three aspects of this concept and shows that they can offer helpful tools in spoken language research. Employing the participant perspective provides us with an alternative to many of the approaches currently in use in the study of spoken language in that it favours small-scale, qualitative research that aims to uncover categories relevant for the participants. Its results can usefully complement large-scale studies of phenomena on all linguistic dimensions of talk.
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.
Conversation is usually considered to be grammatically simple, while academic writing is often claimed to be structurally complex, associated primarily with a greater use of dependent clauses. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on the results of large-scale corpus investigations. We argue that both conversation and professional academic writing are grammatically complex but that their complexities are dramatically different. Surprisingly, the traditional view that complexity is realized through extensive clausal embedding leads to the conclusion that conversation is more complex than academic writing. In contrast, written academic discourse is actually much more ‘compressed’ than elaborated, and the complexities of academic writing are realized mostly as phrasal embedding rather than embedded clauses.
While written corpora can be exploited without any linguistic annotations, speech corpora need at least a basic transcription to be of any use for linguistic research. The basic annotation of speech data usually consists of time-aligned orthographic transcriptions. To answer phonetic or phonological research questions, phonetic transcriptions are needed as well. However, manual annotation is very time-consuming and requires considerable skill and near-native competence. Therefore it can take years of speech corpus compilation and annotation before any analyses can be carried out. In this paper, approaches that address the transcription bottleneck of speech corpus exploitation are presented and discussed, including crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription, automatic phonetic alignment, and query-driven annotation. Currently, query-driven annotation and automatic phonetic alignment are being combined and applied in two speech research projects at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), whereas crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription still awaits implementation.
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.
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.
Rescuing Legacy Data
(2008)
This paper discusses issues that arise in the transformation of electronic language data from outdated to modern, sustainable formats. We first describe the problem and then present four different cases in which corpora of spoken language were converted from legacy formats to an XML-based representation. For each of the four cases, we describe the conversion workflow and discuss the difficulties that we had to overcome. Based on this experience, we formulate some more general observations about transforming legacy data and conclude with a set of best practice recommendations for a more sustainable handling of language corpora.
In this paper we investigate the coverage of the two knowledge sources WordNet and Wikipedia for the task of bridging resolution. We report on an annotation experiment which yielded pairs of bridging anaphors and their antecedents in spoken multi-party dialog. Manual inspection of the two knowledge sources showed that, with some interesting exceptions, Wikipedia is superior to WordNet when it comes to the coverage of information necessary to resolve the bridging anaphors in our data set. We further describe a simple procedure for the automatic extraction of the required knowledge from Wikipedia by means of an API, and discuss some of the implications of the procedure’s performance.
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 an implemented machine learning system for the automatic detection of nonreferential it in spoken dialog. The system builds on shallow features extracted from dialog transcripts. Our experiments indicate a level of performance that makes the system usable as a preprocessing filter for a coreference resolution system. We also report results of an annotation study dealing with the classification of it by naive subjects.
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.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the actual need for corpora that have been annotated based on acoustic information. The acoustic information should be coded in features or properties and is needed to inform further processing systems, i.e. to present a basis for a speech recognition system using linguistic information. Feature annotation of existing corpora in combination with segmental annotation can provide a powerful training material for speech recognition systems, but will as well challenge the further processing of features to segments and syllables. We present here the theoretical preliminaries for our multilingual feature extraction system, that we are currently working on.
This paper describes EXMARaLDA, an XML-based framework for the construction, dissemination and analysis of corpora of spoken language transcriptions. Departing from a prototypical example of a “partitur” (musical score) transcription, the EXMARaLDA “single timeline, multiple tiers” data model and format is presented alongside with the EXMARaLDA Partitur-Editor, a tool for inputting and visualizing such data. This is followed by a discussion of the interaction of EXMARaLDA with other frameworks and tools that work with similar data models. Finally, this paper presents an extension of the “single timeline, multiple tiers” data model and describes its application within the EXMARaLDA system.
We apply a decision tree based approach to pronoun resolution in spoken dialogue. Our system deals with pronouns with NP- and non-NP-antecedents. We present a set of features designed for pronoun resolution in spoken dialogue and determine the most promising features. We evaluate the system on twenty Switchboard dialogues and show that it compares well to Byron’s (2002) manually tuned system.
Online Access Tools for Spoken German: The Resources of the Deutsches Spracharchiv in a Database
(2002)
This paper shows some details of the modernization of the Deutsches Spracharchiv (DSAv). It explores some future possibilities of linguistical documentation and analysis using the Web. The Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim is the central institution for linguistic research in Germany. The DSAv in the IDS is the center for documentation and research of spoken German. These archives include the largest collection of sound recordings of spoken German (dialects and colloquial speech, including e.g. lots of extinct dialects of former German territories in Eastern Europe) - altogether more than 15,000 sound recordings. The lacking clarification and accessibility of this data material has been felt as an essential deficit. The opportunity to edit the sound signal digitally offers a much easier access to spoken language. Through the integration of the already existing information about the corpora and the transcribed texts in an information- and full text databank, as well as the linking of the data with the acoustic signal (alignment), arises a data-pool with considerably better documentation of the materials and a fast direct grasp of the recorded sounds. Thus, the DSAv initiates totally new research questions for the work at the IDS, as well as for linguistics altogether.
This paper describes EXMARaLDA, a system for computer transcription of spoken discourse developed and used by the SFB "Mehrsprachigkeit" at the university of Hamburg. EXMARaLDA consists of several DTDs for XML coding of transcription data and some input and output tools for these formats. Apart from being a transcription system in its own right, EXMARaLDA also plays the role of a mediator between older existing data formats at the SFB and between these formats and a planned database of multilingual spoken discourse.
The Partitur Format at BAS
(1997)
Most spoken language resources are produced and disseminated together with symbolic information relating to the speech signal. These are for instance orthographic transcript labeling and segmentation on the phonologic phoneti prosodic phrasal level. Most of the known formats for these symbolic data are defined in a ‘closed form’ that is not fexible enough to allow simple and platform independent processing and easy extensions.
At the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) a new format has been developed and used over the last few years that shows some significant advantages over other existing formats. This paper describes the basic principles behind this format discusses briefly the advantages and gives detailed definitions of the description levels used so far.