LREC 2006 - Proceedings sorted by papers

Title	Discourse functions of duration in Mandarin: resource design and implementation
Authors	D. Gibbon, S. Tseng
Abstract	A dedicated resource, consisting of annotated speech tools, and workflow design, was developed for the detailed investigation of discourse phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin. The discourse phenomena have functions which are associated with positions in utterances, and temporal properties, and include discourse markers (“NAGE”, “NA”, e.g. “hesitation”, “utterance initiation”), discourse particles (“A”, e.g. “utterance finality”, “utterance continuity”, “focus”, etc.), and fillers (“UHN”, “hesitation”). The distribution of particles in relation to their position in utterances and the temporal properties of particles are investigated. The results of the investigation diverge considerably from claims in existing grammars of Mandarin with respect to utterance position, and show in general greater length than for regular syllables. These properties suggest the possibility of developing an automatic discourse item tagger.
Keywords	annotation mining, discourse phenomena, hesitation, corpus, spontaneous conversation
Full paper	Discourse functions of duration in Mandarin: resource design and implementation

Title

Discourse functions of duration in Mandarin: resource design and implementation

Authors

D. Gibbon, S. Tseng

Abstract

A dedicated resource, consisting of annotated speech tools, and workflow design, was developed for the detailed investigation of discourse phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin. The discourse phenomena have functions which are associated with positions in utterances, and temporal properties, and include discourse markers (“NAGE”, “NA”, e.g. “hesitation”, “utterance initiation”), discourse particles (“A”, e.g. “utterance finality”, “utterance continuity”, “focus”, etc.), and fillers (“UHN”, “hesitation”). The distribution of particles in relation to their position in utterances and the temporal properties of particles are investigated. The results of the investigation diverge considerably from claims in existing grammars of Mandarin with respect to utterance position, and show in general greater length than for regular syllables. These properties suggest the possibility of developing an automatic discourse item tagger.

Keywords

annotation mining, discourse phenomena, hesitation, corpus, spontaneous conversation

Full paper

Discourse functions of duration in Mandarin: resource design and implementation