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The grammatical annotation of speech corpora

Techniques and perspectives
  • Eckhard Bick
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Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies
This chapter is in the book Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies

Abstract

This chapter discusses the grammatical annotation of speech corpora on the one hand (C-ORAL-Brasil, NURC) and speech-like text on the other (e-mail, chat, tv-news, parliamentary discussions), drawing on Portuguese data for the former and English data for the latter. We try to identify and compare linguistic orality markers (“speechlikeness”) in different genres, and argue that broad-coverage Constraint Grammar parsers such as PALAVRAS and EngGram can be adapted to these features, and used across the text-speech divide. Special topics include emoticons, phonetic variation and syntactic features. For ordinary speech corpora we propose a system of two-level annotation, where overlaps, retractions and phonetic variation are maintained as meta-tagging, while allowing conventional annotation of an orthographically normalized textual layer. In the absence of punctuation, syntactic segmentation can be achieved by exploiting prosodic breaks as delimiters in parsing rules. With the exception of chat data, our modified “oral” CG parsers perform reasonably close to their written language counterparts, even for true transcribed speech, achieving accuracy rates (F-scores) above 98% for PoS tags and 93–95% for syntactic function.

Abstract

This chapter discusses the grammatical annotation of speech corpora on the one hand (C-ORAL-Brasil, NURC) and speech-like text on the other (e-mail, chat, tv-news, parliamentary discussions), drawing on Portuguese data for the former and English data for the latter. We try to identify and compare linguistic orality markers (“speechlikeness”) in different genres, and argue that broad-coverage Constraint Grammar parsers such as PALAVRAS and EngGram can be adapted to these features, and used across the text-speech divide. Special topics include emoticons, phonetic variation and syntactic features. For ordinary speech corpora we propose a system of two-level annotation, where overlaps, retractions and phonetic variation are maintained as meta-tagging, while allowing conventional annotation of an orthographically normalized textual layer. In the absence of punctuation, syntactic segmentation can be achieved by exploiting prosodic breaks as delimiters in parsing rules. With the exception of chat data, our modified “oral” CG parsers perform reasonably close to their written language counterparts, even for true transcribed speech, achieving accuracy rates (F-scores) above 98% for PoS tags and 93–95% for syntactic function.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction: Spoken corpora and linguistic studies 1
  5. Section I: Experiences and requirements of spoken corpora compilation
  6. Methodological issues for spontaneous speech corpora compilation 27
  7. A multilingual speech corpus of North-Germanic languages 69
  8. Methodological considerations for the development and use of sign language acquisition corpora 84
  9. Section II: Multilevel corpus annotation
  10. The grammatical annotation of speech corpora 105
  11. The IPIC resource and a cross-linguistic analysis of information structure in Italian and Brazilian Portuguese 129
  12. The variation of action verbs in multilingual spontaneous speech corpora 152
  13. Section III: Prosody and its functional levels
  14. Speech and corpora 191
  15. Corpus design for studying the expression of emotion in speech 210
  16. Illocution, attitudes and prosody 233
  17. Exploring the prosody of stance 271
  18. Section IV: Syntax and Information Structure
  19. Prosody and information structure 297
  20. The notion of sentence and other discourse units in corpus annotation 331
  21. Syntactic properties of spontaneous speech in the Language into Act Theory 365
  22. Prosodic constraints for discourse markers 411
  23. Appendix 468
  24. Index 496
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.61.04bic

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction: Spoken corpora and linguistic studies 1
  5. Section I: Experiences and requirements of spoken corpora compilation
  6. Methodological issues for spontaneous speech corpora compilation 27
  7. A multilingual speech corpus of North-Germanic languages 69
  8. Methodological considerations for the development and use of sign language acquisition corpora 84
  9. Section II: Multilevel corpus annotation
  10. The grammatical annotation of speech corpora 105
  11. The IPIC resource and a cross-linguistic analysis of information structure in Italian and Brazilian Portuguese 129
  12. The variation of action verbs in multilingual spontaneous speech corpora 152
  13. Section III: Prosody and its functional levels
  14. Speech and corpora 191
  15. Corpus design for studying the expression of emotion in speech 210
  16. Illocution, attitudes and prosody 233
  17. Exploring the prosody of stance 271
  18. Section IV: Syntax and Information Structure
  19. Prosody and information structure 297
  20. The notion of sentence and other discourse units in corpus annotation 331
  21. Syntactic properties of spontaneous speech in the Language into Act Theory 365
  22. Prosodic constraints for discourse markers 411
  23. Appendix 468
  24. Index 496
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