Head of program area: Dr. Thomas Schmidt, thomas.schmidt(at)ids-mannheim.de

The program area "Oral Corpora" is concerned with maintaining and extending the oral corpora in the Archive for Spoken German (AGD), with developing and mediating methods and technology for compiling and working with oral corpora, and with contributing to initiatives for the establishment of standards and good practices in the area of oral corpora.

Maintenance and development of oral corpora

The Archive for Spoken German (AGD) collects and archives data of spoken German in interactions (interaction corpora) and data of domestic and non-domestic varieties of German (variation corpora). The corpora are curated in the archive and made available to the scientific public. [AGD-Flyer]

With the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK), the program area is building up a large German interaction corpus, which is made available through the Database of Spoken German.

Methods

The Conversation Analytic Information System (GAIS) provides up-to-date information on conversation analysis and related disciplines. It is designed to become an online handbook covering all elements of a typical empirical and corpus-based workflow in conversation analysis.

Project Corpus Technology

The Database of Spoken German (DGD) is a platform for accessing the oral corpora of the AGD. The DGD provides researchers, teachers and students with a web-based source for browsing and querying FOLK and other AGD data. [DGD-Flyer]

For the FOLK project, we developed the transcription editor FOLKER and the annotation tool OrthoNormal both of which are also made available to the scientific public. [FOLKER-Flyer]

In collaboration with the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora, the program area also contributes to the development and provides support for EXMARaLDA, a system for compiling, managing and analyzing oral corpora. [EXMARaLDA-Flyer]

External projects

• The project "Accessing multimodal spoken language corpora: cross-linking and user-group specific differentiation" (ZuMult) is funded in the LIS program of the DFG. ZuMult is a cooperation between the Program Area "Oral Corpora", the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (University of Hamburg) and the Herder Institute (University of Leipzig). It aims at building a common architecture for accessing oral corpus data and developing access methods for these data which are tailored to the needs of specific user groups.

Featured recent publications in English:

• Schmidt, Thomas (2016): Construction and Dissemination of a Corpus of Spoken Interaction - Tools and Workflows in the FOLK project. In: Corpus Linguistic Software Tools, Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL 31/1), by Kupietz, Marc & Geyken, Alexander (eds.), pp. 127-154. PDF
• Westpfahl, Swantje / Schmidt, Thomas (2016): FOLK-Gold – A GOLD standard for Part-of-Speech-Tagging of Spoken German. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), Portorož, Slovenia. Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 1493-1499. PDF
• Schmidt, Thomas (2016): Good practices in the compilation of FOLK, the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German. In: Compilation, transcription, markup and annotation of spoken corpora, by Kirk, John M. and Gisle Andersen (eds.), Special Issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics [IJCL 21:3], pp. 396-418.
• Ruhi, Şükriye / Haugh, Michael / Schmidt, Thomas / Wörner, Kai (eds.) (2014): Best Practices for Spoken Corpora in Linguistic Research. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Schmidt, Thomas (2014): The Database for Spoken German - DGD2. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 1451-1457. PDF
• Schmidt, Thomas (2014): The Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German - FOLK. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 383-387. PDF
• Schmidt, Thomas / Wörner, Kai (2014): EXMARaLDA. In: Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut, and Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: OUP, pp. 402-419.
• Schmidt, Thomas (2012): EXMARaLDA and the FOLK tools. Two toolsets for transcribing and annotating spoken language. In: Proceedings of the Eighth conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-12), Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2012, pp. 236-240.
• Schmidt, Thomas/Wörner, Kai (eds.) (2012): Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis. (= Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 14). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2012.
• Schmidt, Thomas (2011): A TEI-based approach to standardising spoken language transcription. In: Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 1/2011.