Falling silent, lost for words ... Tracing personal involvement in interviews with Dutch war veterans

Henk van den Heuvel, Nelleke Oostdijk


Abstract
In sources used in oral history research (such as interviews with eye witnesses), passages where the degree of personal emotional involvement is found to be high can be of particular interest, as these may give insight into how historical events were experienced, and what moral dilemmas and psychological or religious struggles were encountered. In a pilot study involving a large corpus of interview recordings with Dutch war veterans, we have investigated if it is possible to develop a method for automatically identifying those passages where the degree of personal emotional involvement is high. The method is based on the automatic detection of exceptionally large silences and filled pause segments (using Automatic Speech Recognition), and cues taken from specific n-grams. The first results appear to be encouraging enough for further elaboration of the method.
Anthology ID:
L16-1158
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
998–1001
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1158
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Henk van den Heuvel and Nelleke Oostdijk. 2016. Falling silent, lost for words ... Tracing personal involvement in interviews with Dutch war veterans. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 998–1001, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Falling silent, lost for words … Tracing personal involvement in interviews with Dutch war veterans (van den Heuvel & Oostdijk, LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1158.pdf