Best Practices for Speech Corpora in Linguistic Research Workshop ...

As previously mentioned, the degree of detail and quality
of the transcription varies, depending on the number of
people working on the data and their training, but also
according to the research needs of the project and the
necessities that have arisen (cf. e.g. the preparation of
part of the Corpus for word search online described in
the next Section). Consequently, not all transcribed texts
appearing in Table 2 are on the same level. In particular,
most transcriptions of face-to-face conversations have
been reworked on the average by three to four different
persons. TV panel discussions, on the other hand, have
only undergone transcription by one to two persons.
The Corpus of Spoken Greek is, thus, unique both in its
aims/conception but also in its make-up, as compared to
the other four existing Greek corpora (of which only one
contains spoken discourse files), since a great part of it
(ca. 44%, i.e. more than 750,000 words) comes from
informal (face-to-face or telephone) conversations.
5. Extensions
As already mentioned, the Corpus of Spoken Greek has
been primarily designed for the qualitative analysis of
language and linguistic communication from a CA
perspective. However, a tool has recently been
developed for the search of words and phrases,
concordances, statistics, etc., in a database consisting of
informal conversations among friends and relatives that
amounts to 200,000 words. This tool, which is available
online, 4 allows the user to track a word, irrespective of
modifications of its form due to the transcription
conventions. Figure 1 illustrates the main page of the
tool for quantitative analyses:
Figure 1: Main page of the tool for quantitative analyses
When searching for a certain word, e.g. � (‘good’,
‘well’), the results are listed in contextual environments
consisting of three lines of transcribed text. These lines
may contain utterances belonging to different speakers
4 Website:
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(symbolized in different color icons before every line).
Figure 2 illustrates two such contextual environments for
the word � . It also shows the total number of its
occurrences –617 in this case.
Figure 2: Search results
The search for a word, e.g. � (‘good’, ‘well’), will
also yield all the words beginning with the letter
sequence -�- -�, e.g. �� (‘reed’), �
(‘basket’). By using the asterisk (*), e.g. * � * or
* � , the search will also yield all the words
containing the letter sequence -�- -� or ending in it.
Finally, the search for pairs of words, e.g. � � or
� , is also possible.
Finally, some statistics can be provided, as for example
the ten most frequent words in this part of the Corpus
shown in Figure 3:
Figure 3: The ten (10) most frequently used words
In addition to the tool for quantitative purposes, we are
currently in the process of assessing alternative
approaches to coding multimodal data (e.g. CLAN,
ELAN, EXMARaLDA), so that the available video
recordings can be adequately transcribed and managed
(cf. e.g. Mondada, 2007; Schmidt & Wörner, 2009) in
ways best suited to the purposes of the Corpus of Spoken
Greek.