Preliminary recommendations on Spoken Texts

2 Introduction

The document starts out by sketching the different transcription and representation of the two research communities concerned with the analysis of spoken texts, the corpus linguistics and the speech community. Whereas the former is, according to Llisterri, mainly concerned with

"acquir[ing] large amounts of data reflecting the natural use of language, [and] therefore emphasis is usually put on the naturalness and spontaneity of the recording, avoiding experimentally controlled situations […]" (p. 4),

object of the latter is

"to obtain controlled speech data for basic research aimed at modelling and describing the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech, or, in the field of speech technology, to derive data for speech synthesis or to build up material for training and testing speech recognition, speaker recognition/verification or spoken language dialogue systems […]" (ibid.).

The differences are summarised in the following table (p.5):

	Corpus linguistics	Speech research
Materials	Unprepared, unelicited speech	Controlled, elicited speech
Scope	Discourse, dialogue	Utterance
Recordings	Natural environment	Controlled environment
Transcription	Orthographic enriched (transcription)	Phonetic and orthographic aligned with the speech signal
Orientation towards	Symbolic, categorical representation	Speech symbol, temporal representation