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

Figure 4: Different syntactic analyses for self-repairs II
node, as is the interregnum. This reflects the idea that all
should belong to the same unit of analysis. This particular
representation, however, makes it hard to recover the wellformed
sentence from the utterance and also gives misleading
search results for linguistic queries looking for, e.g., the
number of direct objects governed by a sentence node.
Figure 5: Different syntactic analyses for self-repairs III
Figure 5 solves this problem by attaching the repair directly
to the sentence node (S). The interregnum is annotated as
part of the reparandum, which (same as in 3) is annotated as
a fragment (FRAG). Filled pauses, however, can also occur
without a self-repair. Thus we decided to treat all fillers the
same and not to include them in the FRAG node containing
the reparandum. This results in our prefered representation,
shown in Figure 6. Our solution is similar to the treatment
of self-repair in the Switchboard corpus (Figure 7).
Figure 6: Different syntactic analyses for self-repairs IV
In the Switchboard corpus, square brackets are used to mark
the beginning (RM) and end (RS) of a self-repair sequence
(Figure 7), and the interruption point (IP), which occurs directly
before the interregnum, is assigning the plus (+) sym-
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Figure 7: Syntactic representation of a self-repair in the
Switchboard corpus (RM: start of disfluency, RS: end of
disfluency; IP: interruption point
bol. The reparandum is attached to a node with the label
EDITED (comparable to our FRAG node). Removing this
EDITED node, which includes all material from the start
of the reparandum up to the interruption point, results in
recovering a well-formed version of the utterance.
Our final representation (Figure 6) allows us to consider
reparandum and repair as a functional unit and to conduct
corpus searches for filled pauses inside of specific constituents,
e.g. comparing the occurences of filled pauses
inside NPs to ones on the sentence level. The annotation
in Switchboard also explicitely encodes the end of the repair,
which our annotation does not. We agree that it would
be desirable to have this information but, considering the
additional effort for manual annotation, refrain from doing
so. Unlike Switchboard, we also annotate unfilled pauses in
the corpus, differentiating beween short pauses (< 1sec),
medium pauses (1 − 3sec) and long pauses (> 3sec). Our
annotation enables the user to identify and discard the fragments
and recover only the well-formed part of the utterance,
if need be.
Repetitions of (sequences of) words without a self-repair
also occur frequently in spoken language data. The repeated
material can occur at any position in the utterance
and, like the self-repair, also inserts extra material which
causes problems for syntactic analysis.
The treatment of repetitions in the Switchboard corpus is
illustrated in Figure 8 and looks similar to the treatment
of self-corrections. The repeated material is attached to
the EDITED node, as is the interruption point. The square
brackets mark begin and end of the repetition, and through
the deletion of the EDITED node the utterance can be transformed
into a well-formed sentence.
Figure 8: Representation of repetitions in the Switchboard
corpus