Annotation specifications of a dialogue corpus for modelling phonetic convergence in technical systems

Authors: Grazyna Demenko, Jolanta Bachan

Abstract:

The present paper describes spoken dialogue corpus creation and its annotation specification for analysis and objective evaluation of phonetic convergence in human-human communication. The analysis of the corpus will serve for creation of convergence models which could be implemented in spoken dialogue systems based on spontaneous, expressive speech. The corpus consists of 13 hours of dialogues between 16 pairs of Polish native speakers and controlled dialogues with a teacher. The speakers knew each other and were at similar age, but during the recording could not see each other. In each recording session the pair of speakers conducted 4 dialogues in neutral scenarios and 6 dialogues in expressive scenarios, 3 dialogues with the teacher, 2 repetition tasks and 1 reading, which provided about 1 hour of speech for each pair. The corpus is being annotated on several layers: orthographic transcription of text, prosody, noise, flow of speaking turns, dialogue acts, agreement and disagreement intervals, extraordinary events and speakerʼs attitude. This scenarios combination and annotation specifications are novel, and promise to provide an empirical foundation for both linguistic and computational dialogue modelling of both face-to-face and man-machine dialogue. The results of preliminary analyses were used for selection of recording scenarios for German speakers. The next step of the ongoing project is to record dialogues between Polish L1 speakers with German L1 and Polish L2 speakers.