A Syntax-Based Scheme for the Annotation and Segmentation of German Spoken Language Interactions

Swantje Westpfahl, Jan Gorisch


Abstract
Unlike corpora of written language where segmentation can mainly be derived from orthographic punctuation marks, the basis for segmenting spoken language corpora is not predetermined by the primary data, but rather has to be established by the corpus compilers. This impedes consistent querying and visualization of such data. Several ways of segmenting have been proposed, some of which are based on syntax. In this study, we developed and evaluated annotation and segmentation guidelines in reference to the topological field model for German. We can show that these guidelines are used consistently across annotators. We also investigated the influence of various interactional settings with a rather simple measure, the word-count per segment and unit-type. We observed that the word count and the distribution of each unit type differ in varying interactional settings and that our developed segmentation and annotation guidelines are used consistently across annotators. In conclusion, our syntax-based segmentations reflect interactional properties that are intrinsic to the social interactions that participants are involved in. This can be used for further analysis of social interaction and opens the possibility for automatic segmentation of transcripts.
Anthology ID:
W18-4913
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Agata Savary, Carlos Ramisch, Jena D. Hwang, Nathan Schneider, Melanie Andresen, Sameer Pradhan, Miriam R. L. Petruck
Venues:
LAW | MWE
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
109–120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4913
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Swantje Westpfahl and Jan Gorisch. 2018. A Syntax-Based Scheme for the Annotation and Segmentation of German Spoken Language Interactions. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018), pages 109–120, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Syntax-Based Scheme for the Annotation and Segmentation of German Spoken Language Interactions (Westpfahl & Gorisch, LAW-MWE 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4913.pdf