Abstract
This article aims to describe key challenges of preparing and releasing audio material for spoken data and to propose solutions to these challenges. We draw on our experience of compiling the new London-Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2), where transcripts are released together with the audio files. However, making the audio material publicly available required careful consideration of how to, most effectively, 1) align the transcripts with the audio and 2) anonymise personal information in the recordings. First, audio-to-text alignment was solved through the insertion of timestamps in front of speaker turns in the transcription stage, which, as we show in the article, may later be used as a valuable complement to more robust automatic segmentation. Second, anonymisation was done by means of a Praat script, which replaced all personal information with a sound that made the lexical information incomprehensible but retained the prosodic characteristics. The public release of the LLC-2 audio material is a valuable feature of the corpus that allows users to extend the corpus data relative to their own research interests and, thus, broaden the scope of corpus linguistics. To illustrate this, we present three studies that have successfully used the LLC-2 audio material.
Highlights
This article aims to describe key challenges of preparing and releasing audio material for spoken data and to propose solutions to these challenges
This is different from corpus linguistics where, normally, corpora are intended to be useful for a wide variety of linguistic interests, and where many researchers consider the primary data to be the transcriptions with annotations of lexical, morpho-syntactic and discourse features (Oostdijk and Boves 2008: 196)
We have focused on two challenges that we had to tackle during the compilation of LLC-2: 1) the alignment of the orthographic transcriptions with the audio files and 2) the anonymisation of personal information in the recordings
Summary
With the advent of several new spoken corpora, challenges related to the various aspects of spoken corpus compilation are currently receiving more and more attention in the research community The aim of this article is to describe and propose solutions to key challenges of preparing and releasing audio material for spoken data It is based on our experience of compiling the new London-Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2; Põldvere et al in press b.; see the user guide in Põldvere et al in press a.). As is the case in many other spoken corpora, the transcriptions in LLC-2 are orthographic and contain information about basic features of spoken interaction such as pauses, overlapping speech and nonverbal vocalisations, but not prosodic and temporal information about pitch movement and the length of transitions between speaker turns These features are, important for spoken language research because they carry useful information about speaker intent.
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