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Annotating discourse markers in spontaneous speech corpora on an example for the Slovenian language

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Abstract

Speech-to-speech translation technology has difficulties processing elements of spontaneity in conversation. We propose a discourse marker attribute in speech corpora to help overcome some of these problems. There have already been some attempts to annotate discourse markers in speech corpora. However, as there is no consistency on what expressions count as discourse markers, we have to reconsider how to set a framework for annotating, and, in order to better understand what we gain by introducing a discourse marker category, we have to analyse their characteristics and functions in discourse. This is especially important for languages such as Slovenian where no or little research on the topic of discourse markers has been carried out. The aims of this paper are to present a scheme for annotating discourse markers based on the analysis of a corpus of telephone conversations in the tourism domain in the Slovenian language, and to give some additional arguments based on the characteristics and functions of discourse markers that confirm their special status in conversation.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank all the tourist companies that helped us record the conversations for the TURDIS corpus: the Sonček, Kompas, Neckermann Reisen and Aritours tourist agencies, the Terme Maribor, especially the Hotel Piramida and the Hotel Habakuk, and the Mariborski zavod za turizem and its tourist office MATIC. We also thank all the tourist agents in these companies whose conversations have been recorded, and all the callers who were ready to use the TURDIS system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Smetanova ul.17, Maribor, 2000, Slovenia

    Darinka Verdonik & Matej Rojc

  2. Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Marko Stabej

Authors
  1. Darinka Verdonik
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  2. Matej Rojc
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  3. Marko Stabej
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Darinka Verdonik.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Transcription of the examples in this paper

The transcription rules for the examples from the TURDIS-1 corpus in this paper are:

  • each caller is identified by the letter K and an index number, e.g., K1

  • each tourist agent is identified by the letter A, two lower case letters, indicating the tourist company he works for (e.g., so for the Soncek tourist agency), and an index number (e.g., Aso1)

  • the speaker’s ID occurs at the beginning of each utterance, or when a turn consists of more than one utterance

  • the text of conversations follows a colon sign (:); for overlapping speech the sign [overlap] is used between the speaker’s ID and the colon sign, for example:

  • K1 [overlap]: text

  • Aso1 [overlap]: text

  • the English translation of each utterance follows a slash sign (/)

  • other signs occurring in the examples are:

Sign

Description

...

Cut-off utterance

wor()

Cut-off word

?

Rising intonation

#word#

Emphasized word

wo[:]rd

Previous phoneme is prolonged

[.]

Short silence

Text [1]

Utterance continues in the first segment that follows, starting with [2]

[2] text

Continuation of the last preceding segment, ending in [1]

text [P] text

Segment includes two utterances, [P] signals the border

∼GMX

Abbreviation is spelled out

@ SI

Abbreviation is pronounced as one word

[+SOGOVORNIK_ja] / [+OVERLAP_yes]

Background signal ja (yes, yeah) overlaps with the previous word of the speaker’s turn

[SOGOVORNIK_ja] / [OVERLAP_ja]

Background signal ja (yes, yeah) is pronounced in a pause that the speaker makes in his talk

[+LAUGH]

The speaker laughing while pronouncing the previous word

[LAUGH]

The speaker laughing

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Verdonik, D., Rojc, M. & Stabej, M. Annotating discourse markers in spontaneous speech corpora on an example for the Slovenian language. Lang Resources & Evaluation 41, 147–180 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9035-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9035-7

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