Oman Royal Speeches Corpus: Compilation and Analysis

Abstract

For many years, researchers have directed their attention primarily toward developing written corpora, with the consequence that spoken corpora have consistently remained rare compared to written ones. The laborious transcription and annotation tasks make creating and maintaining spoken corpora a challenging endeavor. This project aims to build a transcribed corpus of Oman Royal Speeches and make it available online through a custom-made concordance tool. The study also aims to test the corpus for fundamental corpus-based lexical, stylistic, and discourse-analytical implementations. Compiling the Oman Royal Speeches Corpus is meant to fill a gap by contributing to the development of Arabic spoken language corpora and make available a research tool that can facilitate corpus-based research, uses, and applications in various areas of investigation. The corpus-building process underwent a five-stage process, including data capture, data processing, concordance tool development, testing and evaluation, and online deployment. With 98,511 tokens, the resultant corpus represents a searchable archive of Royal Speeches with a built-in online concordance tool that allows multiple search types and Keyword-in-Context query result display. The corpus has been tested for various corpus-analytic uses and has been found to provide significant findings in these areas. Thus, it has the potential to function as a reliable and authentic record and source of information for researchers and specialists in various fields, as well as a research tool allowing for various applications and analyses in language-related topics.