Abstract
This paper deals with an inter-annotator agreement test involving the identification of the information unit of Topic as defined within the framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). Fleiss’s kappa statistic was used to measure the agreement among the four annotators who took part in the test. The data used was sampled from C-ORAL-BRASIL II, a spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese. The paper begins by outlining of the theoretical underpinnings of L-AcT, dedicating special attention to aspects directly related to the notion of Topic. Section 2 presents the pilot test and discusses methodological and theoretical issues that were relevant for the design of the protocol that was eventually used in the actual test. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the test, its protocol and results (the kappa coefficient for the general agreement was 0.79, which by usual standards represents a substantial agreement). Section 5 first provides a brief review of a few studies conducted according to other frameworks which have dealt with inter-rater agreement on the annotation of information structure categories. Finally, the errors observed in the test are analyzed qualitatively.
Highlights
This paper deals with the interrater agreement on the detection of the information unit of Topic as defined within the framework of Language into Act Theory (LAcT; Cresti 2000; Cresti 2018; Moneglia & Raso 2014; Cavalcante 2020)
By providing the annotators with the utterances accompanied by their surrounding context, the guidelines containing specifications as to what constitutes a TOP unit and instructions on how to detect it, and barring the visualization of f0 curves, we achieved a high level of interrater agreement that resulted in a kappa coefficient k = 0.79
We have reported the results of an agreement test that supports the validity of the definition of TOP proposed by Language into Act Theory (L-AcT)
Summary
This paper deals with the interrater agreement on the detection of the information unit of Topic as defined within the framework of Language into Act Theory (LAcT; Cresti 2000; Cresti 2018; Moneglia & Raso 2014; Cavalcante 2020). L-AcT constitutes a pragmatic framework for speech analysis developed on the basis of. - The speech flow is segmented by means of terminal and non-terminal prosodic boundaries. The speech sequence between two terminal boundaries, called terminated sequence (TS), is pragmatically and prosodically autonomous, and carries at least one illocutionary prosodic unit. TSs can be of two types: utterances and stanzas. While utterances are composed of one single pattern of prosodic units, stanzas are composed of a sequence of juxtaposed sub-patterns, linked to one another by a prosodic signal of continuity. Stanzas are always segmented into more than one prosodic unit by means of non-terminal prosodic boundaries. Utterances that feature nonterminal prosodic boundaries are called compound utterances, whereas those that do not are called simple utterances, and their single prosodic unit necessarily carries the illocution
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