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

6. Conclusion
The global corpus data model for speech databases is a
pragmatic approach to supporting phonetic and linguistic
research. It provides a means to exchange data with a multitude
of speech processing tools, and allows proceduralizing
often-needed research and development tasks. The two case
studies show that quite different tasks can be performed on
the same data base in parallel.
The global corpus data model will slowly evolve, and it
will be slightly different in different research and development
labs, because of different requirements and tools used.
However, simply the fact that there exists a global corpus
data model with visible and formally specified data structures,
e.g. in a relational schema description, will lead to a
much higher degree of consistency and coverage in speech
database creation.
One major challenge is the development of a query language
suitable for linguistic and phonetic researchers. This
query language must be much closer to the application domain
than SQL can ever be, and it must be sufficiently powerful
to express the queries that researchers in phonetics or
linguistics ask. A promising approach is to provide a query
language such as XQuery or a graphical query interface to
the database base, and to compile this query into SQL for
efficient execution in the database.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the Statistical Consulting Unit, Department
of Statistics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt, Munich
for its support of the analysis of the German dialect
perception experiment data. Thanks also go the the pupils
and schools in Scotland who participated in the Scottish English
VOYS recordings, Catherine Dicke and Felix Schaeffler
for organizing the recordings in Scotland, and the students
at LMU who transcribed and annotated these recordings.
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