Abstract
The paper examines the properties of expert manual annotation of Russian spontaneous speech. While it is well known that experts exhibit variability in the ways they mark transcripted speech, our aim is to arrive at the reasons behind such variability. In this study we focus on the annotator’s psychological profile (personality traits, working memory capacity, processing speed and lateral asymmetry). Our focus is to determine whether there is a relationship between the annotated sentence length and the psychological and cognitive characteristics of the annotator. We also study inter-annotator agreement in different text types. The participants (n = 80) detected sentence boundaries in the transcripts of Russian spontaneous speech and performed several test tasks. Personality traits were measured using the Five Factor Personality Inventory. Working memory capacity was measured through reading span and operation span tasks. To compute processing speed we used Letter Comparison and Pattern Comparison tasks. A dominant hemisphere for speech processing was established based on a dichotic listening task. The data analysis did not reveal any relationship between annotators individual characteristics and segmentation results. However, we found that annotators do tend to mark sentence length in a way that is individual to them and that such practices remain relatively stable regardless of text type or even language.
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Notes
- 1.
We follow [13] for factor names since this version of the Big Five was used as the basis for the Russian version.
- 2.
‘the series of pictures is called “The Hat” /a, b, c/ in the first of them a man is shown in a hat shop is trying on hats in the mirror /a, b, c/ obviously it suits him /b/ he buys it /c/ goes out into the street /b, c/ in the street there is strong wind /b, c/ it blows the hat off him /b, c / the hat is flying /c/ is reaching a pool /c/ is floating on the water /a, b, c/’.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 15–04—00165. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Stepikhov, A., Loukina, A., Stepikhova, N. (2019). Syntactic Segmentation of Spontaneous Speech: Psychological and Cognitive Aspects. In: Salah, A., Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_47
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