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

A linguistics-based speech corpus
Janne Bondi Johannessen 1 , Øystein Alexander Vangsnes 2 , Joel Priestley 1 , Kristin Hagen 1
Department of Linguistics and Nordic Studies, University of Oslo 1
CASTL, University of Tromsø 2
P.O.Box 1102 Blindern, UiO, 0317 Oslo, Norway 1
Faculty of Humanities, UiT, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway 2
E-mail: jannebj@iln.uio.no, oystein.vangsnes@uit.no, joeljp@gmail.com, kristiha@iln.uio.no
Abstract
In this paper we focus on the linguistic basis for the choices made in the Nordic Dialect Corpus. We focus on transcriptions,
annotations, selection of informants, recording situation, user-friendly search interface, links to audio and video, various viewings of
results, including maps.
Keywords: linguistic basis, speech corpus, dialectology, Nordic languages, user-friendliness, transcription, tagging, maps.
1. Introduction
In this paper we will discuss and show the
Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al. 2009),
which was launched in November 2011. The
corpus was developed through years of
discussions among linguists about such issues as
transcriptions and desirable search features. It
was subsequently developed in close
cooperation between technicians and linguists.
The corpus is designed to facilitate studies of
variation; this is more costly, but still more
rewarding. We’ve had a focus on user
friendliness throughout, and also a focus on
recoverability of the data (link to audio, video,
two level transcription).
The paper focuses on the choices decided
by the linguists and dialectologists.
2. About the Nordic Dialect Corpus
The Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC) was planned
by linguists from universities in six countries:
Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland,
Norway, and Sweden within the research
network Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
(ScanDiaSyn). The aim was to collect large
amounts of speech data and have them available
in a corpus for easy access across the Nordic
countries. There were two reasons why this was
a good idea: First, the Nordic (North Germanic)
languages are very similar to each other, and
their dialects can be argued to form a large
dialect continuum. Second, dialect syntax had
for decades been a neglected field of research in
Nordic dialectology, and the hope was that with
large amounts of new material, new studies
would be possible.
The work started in 2006 and the corpus
was launched in 2011. It covers five languages
(Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and
Swedish). Most of the recordings have been
1
done after 2000, but some of the Norwegian
ones are also from 1950–80. There are
altogether 223 recording places and 794
informants.
The overall number of transcribed words is
2,74 million. The corpus has been very costly to
build because of the man power needed. As an
example, transcribing the Norwegian part alone
took 14 people to do, and more than 35 people
have been involved in the recording work in
Norway only, which included a lot of travel and
organising. The Swedish recordings were given
to us by an earlier phonetics/phonology project,
Swedia 2000, which was a great asset. Along the
way, several national research councils, Nordic
funds, and individual universities, have
contributed. The Text Laboratory at the
University of Oslo has been responsible for the
technical development.
We know of no other speech corpus that has
the combination that the NDC has of two level
transcriptions, easy search-interface, direct links
to audio and video, maps, result handling, and
availability on the web. We refer to Johannessen
et al. (2009) for a comparison with other corpora,
and likewise to the proceedings of the GSCP
2012 International Conference on Speech and
Corpora, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (see URL in
reference list).
3. Recordings and informants
Since the goal of the project was to facilitate
dialectological research, we put much effort into
finding suitable informants. The places were
selected carefully to represent all dialect types.
Given the differences between the countries, this
meant that there are also differences between the
necessary number of recording places, for
example, in Norway there are 110 (of modern
recordings, i.e. from 2006–2011), in Denmark
only 15.
The informants were to represent the