Title

On the Usefulness of Large Spoken Language Corpora for Linguistic Research

Author(s)

Christophe Van Bael, Helmer Strik, Henk van den Heuvel

Department of Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Session

P27-SE

Abstract

In the past, fundamental linguistic research was typically conducted on small data sets that were handcrafted for the specific research at hand. However, from the eighties onwards, many large spoken language corpora have become available. This study investigates the usefulness of large multi-purpose spoken language corpora for fundamental linguistic research. A research task was designed in which we tried to capture the major pronunciation differences between three speech styles in context-sensitive re-write rules at the phone level. These re-write rules were extracted from the alignments of both a manual phonetic transcription and an automatic phonetic transcription with a canonical reference transcription of the same material.

Keyword(s)

Evaluation, spoken language corpora, phonetic transcriptions, speech styles, pronunciation variation

Language(s)

Dutch

Full Paper

359.pdf