Macro Episodes of Russian Everyday Oral Communication: Towards Pragmatic Annotation of the ORD Speech Corpus

Abstract

The ORD corpus is a representative resource of everyday spoken Russian that contains about 1000 h of long-term audio recordings of daily communication made in real settings by research volunteers. ORD macro episodes are the large communication episodes united by setting/scene of communication, social roles of participants and their general activity. The paper describes annotation principles used for tagging of macro episodes, provides current statistics on communication situations presented in the corpus and reveals their most common types. Annotation of communication situations allows using these codes as filters for selection of audio data, therefore making it possible to study Russian everyday speech in different communication situations, to determine and describe various registers of spoken Russian. As an example, several high frequency word lists referring to different communication situations are compared. Annotation of macro episodes that is made for the ORD corpus is a prerequisite for its further pragmatic annotation.