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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.
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.
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.
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.
The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-) standard German spoken by young and older educated adults, and to identify and locate the regional features. To this end, an extensive corpus of read and spontaneous speech is currently being compiled. German is a so-called pluricentric language. With our corpus we aim to determine whether national or regional standards really exist. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus will enable us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in the domain of the German standard language. The main focus of all research questions is on phonetic variation (lexical variation is only of minor interest). Read and spontaneous speech of four secondary school students (aged seventeen to twenty) and two fifty- to sixt-year-olds is recorded in 160 cities throughout the German-speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and word lists, name pictures, translate from English, and take part in a sociobiographic interview and a map task experiment. The resulting corpus will comprise over 1000 hours of orthographically and (in part) phonetically transcribed speech.