The research and teaching corpus of spoken German – FOLK

"FOLK is the ""Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK)"" (eng.: research and teaching corpus of spoken German). The project has set itself the aim of building a corpus of German conversations which a) covers a broad range of interaction types in private, institutional and public settings, b) is sufficiently large and diverse and of sufficient quality to support different qualitative and quantitative research approaches, c) is transcribed, annotated and made accessible according to current technological standards, and d) is available to the scientific community on a sound legal basis and without unnecessary restrictions of usage. This paper gives an overview of the corpus design, the strategies for acquisition of a diverse range of interaction data, and the corpus construction workflow from recording via transcription an annotation to dissemination.

User, who art thou? User profiling for oral corpus platforms

This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts

Reconstruction of Separable Particle Verbs in a Corpus of Spoken German

We present a method for detecting and reconstructing separated particle verbs in a corpus of spoken German by following an approach suggested for written language. Our study shows that the method can be applied successfully to spoken language, compares different ways of dealing with structures that are specific to spoken language corpora, analyses some remaining problems, and discusses ways of optimising precision or recall for the method. The outlook sketches some possibilities for further work in related areas

Gesprächskorpora. Aktuelle Herausforderungen für einen besonderen Korpustyp

Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit Gesprächskorpora als einem besonderen Typus von Korpora gesprochener Sprache auseinander. Es werden zunächst wesentliche Eigenschaften solcher Korpora herausgearbeitet und einige der wichtigsten deutschsprachigen Gesprächskorpora vorgestellt. Der zweite Teil des Beitrags setzt sich dann mit dem Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) auseinander. FOLK hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, ein wissenschaftsöffentliches Korpus von Interaktionsdaten aufzubauen, das methodisch und technisch dem aktuellen Forschungsstand entspricht. Die Herausforderungen, die sich beim Aufbau von FOLK in methodischer und korpustechnologischer Hinsicht stellen, werden in abschließenden Abschnitt diskutiert

Developing computational infrastructure for the CorCenCC corpus - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) is the first comprehensive corpus of Welsh designed to be reflective of language use across communication types, genres, speakers, language varieties (regional and social) and contexts. This article focuses on the computational infrastructure that we have designed to support data collection for CorCenCC, and the subsequent uses of the corpus which include lexicography, pedagogical research and corpus analysis. A grass-roots approach to design has been adopted, that has adapted and extended previous corpus-building and introduced new features as required for this specific context and language. The key pillars of the infrastructure include a framework that supports metadata collection, an innovative mobile application designed to collect spoken data (utilising a crowdsourcing approach), a backend database that stores curated data and a web-based interface that allows users to query the data online. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the user facing tools and to suggest directions for future improvements. Though the infrastructure was developed for Welsh language collection, its design can be re-used to support corpus development in other minority or major language contexts, broadening the potential utility and impact of this work

Reformulierungsindikatoren im gesprochenen Deutsch: Die Benutzung der Ressourcen DGD und FOLK für gesprächsanalytische Zwecke

Dieser Beitrag stellt nach einer kurzen allgemeinen Einführung die Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) und das Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) als Instrumente speziell für gesprächsanalytisches Arbeiten vor. Anhand des Beispiels sprich als Diskursmarker für Reformulierungen werden Schritt für Schritt die Ressourcen und Tools für systematische korpus- und datenbankgesteuerte Recherchen illustriert: Nutzungsmöglichkeiten der Token-, Kontext-, Metadaten- und Positionssuche werden gezeigt, jeweils in Bezug auf und im wechselseitigen Verhältnis mit qualitativen Fallanalysen, auch mit Belegannotationen nach analyserelevanten (strukturellen und funktionalen) Kategorien. Schließlich wird das heißt als weiterer Reformulierungsindikator für eine vergleichende Analyse herangezogen. Dieser Beitrag stellt eine detailliertere Ausarbeitung einer kürzeren, eher technisch-didaktischen Online-Handreichung (Kaiser/ Schmidt 2016) zu diesem Thema dar, und hat einen stärker inhaltlich-analytischen Fokus.This article presents the Database for Spoken German (DGD) and the Research and Teaching Corpus Spoken German (FOLK) as tools mainly for conversation analytic studies. The resources and tools for systematic corpus- and database-controlled searches are illustrated step by step, using the example of sprich (say / that is) as a discourse marker for reformulations. Uses of token- , context-, metadata- and positional search are shown, with respect to and in a reciprocal relationship with qualitative case analysis, also using annotations according to analysis-relevant (structural and functional) categories. Finally it is shown a comparative analysis of das heißt (that is) as a further reformulation marker. This paper is an extension and elaboration of a shorter, rather technical and didactic guideline (Kaiser/Schmidt 2016) on the same topic, and has a more content-analytical focus

Data of German speech minorities in the Archive for Spoken German: an overview

Speech islands are historically and developmentally unique and will inevitably disappear within the next decades. We urgently need to preserve their remains and exploit what is left in order to make research on language-in-contact and historical as well as current comparative language research possible. The Archive for Spoken German (AGD) at the Institute for German Language collects, fosters and archives data from completed research projects and makes them available to the wider research community. Besides large variation corpora and corpora of conversational speech, the archive already contains a range of collections of data on German speech minorities. The latter will be outlined in this chapter. Some speech island data is already made available through the personal service of the AGD, or the database of spoken German (DGD), e.g. data on Australian German, Unserdeutsch, or German in North America. Some corpora are still being prepared for publication, but still important to document for potentially interested research projects. We therefore also explain the current problems and efforts related to the curation of speech island data, from the digitization of recordings and the collection of metadata, to the integration of transcriptions, annotations and other ways of accessing and sharing data

The database for spoken German - DGD2

The Database for Spoken German (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD2, http://dgd.ids-mannheim.de) is the central platform for publishing and disseminating spoken language corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch, AGD, http://agd.ids-mannheim.de) at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. The corpora contained in the DGD2 come from a variety of sources, some of them in-house projects, some of them external projects. Most of the corpora were originally intended either for research into the (dialectal) variation of German or for studies in conversation analysis and related fields. The AGD has taken over the task of permanently archiving these resources and making them available for reuse to the research community. To date, the DGD2 offers access to 19 different corpora, totalling around 9000 speech events, 2500 hours of audio recordings or 8 million transcribed words. This paper gives an overview of the data made available via the DGD2, of the technical basis for its implementation, and of the most important functionalities it offers. The paper concludes with information about the users of the database and future plans for its development