Abstract
We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that reflects spoken interactions between children and adults. The corpus is an integral part of the CHILDES database, which distributes similar corpora for over 25 languages. We introduce a dedicated transcription scheme for the spoken Hebrew data that is sensitive to both the phonology and the standard orthography of the language. We also introduce a morphological analyzer that was specifically developed for this corpus. The analyzer adequately covers the entire corpus, producing detailed correct analyses for all tokens. Evaluation on a new corpus reveals high coverage as well. Finally, we describe a morphological disambiguation module that selects the correct analysis of each token in context. The result is a high-quality morphologically-annotated CHILDES corpus of Hebrew, along with a set of tools that can be applied to new corpora.
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Notes
The MOR program was initially developed by Roland Hausser and Mitzi Morris. It is described in detail in Hausser (1989).
Diacritics are produced through addition of overprinting Unicode characters and are not single Unicode characters.
There are two other verbal templatic patterns, the passive counterparts of two of the five major binyanim. These are fully predictable from their active counterparts.
Note that the features scat, root and ptn are the general verbal features that are propagated to the output (syntactic category, consonantal root and pattern, respectively). Unlike these, the features part, past, fut and imp are only required for the proper A-rule match within the designated subsections (participle/present tense, past tense, future tense and imperative forms, respectively).
The categories are adjective, adverb, communicator, copula, existential, negation, numeral, onomatopoeia, preposition, pronoun, punctuation, quantifier, question, unknown, verb and vocalization.
We did not measure inter-coder agreement, but we estimate that more than 90 % of the ambiguous tokens were identically annotated by both lexicographers. Consolidating the differences was a quick and easy task.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Grant No. 2007241 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). We are grateful to Hadass Zaidenberg, Maayan Bloch and Ezer Rasin for their meticulous lexicographic work, to Arnon Lazerson for developing the conversion script, and to Shai Gretz for helping with the manual annotation.
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Albert, A., MacWhinney, B., Nir, B. et al. The Hebrew CHILDES corpus: transcription and morphological analysis. Lang Resources & Evaluation 47, 973–1005 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9214-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9214-z