Infrastructure for Collaborative Annotation of Speech

Vast amounts of digital language data (primary data) and increasingly complex linguistic annotations (secondary data) are being created around the world with accelerating speed. There is a real risk of losing much of this data unless the compilers of language resources (primary and secondary data) and creators of tools start to pay more attention to the reusability of the resources and the interoperability of the tools. In this poster we report our effort to create best practices for the creation and dissemination of reusable speech resources in Finland. Our suggested solution allows collaborative annotation, which means that researchers in different sites can work on the same speech data, adding different kinds of linguistic annotation and share their work with other researchers. Reuse is Still a Problem The reusability and interoperability of language resources has been a recurring theme in language resources related conferences and workshops in recent years. In short, the reuse of existing language data and linguistic annotation is currently too cumbersome and time consuming if it is at all possible. In the long term the reusability problem will hopefully be solved by the emergence of international standards. As has been reported in the previous LREC conference there is a working committee of the International Standards Organization (ISO TC 37 SC4) working on standards for language resources. One cannot, however, put resource creation on hold while an international standard is in the making. In the short term, time is best used in developing competing tools, services and best practices that are reusable, extendible, interoperable and portable. Efforts to create best practices should also give important feedback to the standardization process. By reusable we mean that the language resource must outlast the project where the resource was created and be usable as it is for different purposes by different users in different environments. By extendible we mean that one must be able to add new types of linguistic annotation to the language data without breaking the existing language resource, e.g. the tools must still work. By interoperable we mean that the language resource can be processed with several contemporary tools. By portable we mean that the language resource must be convertible to other formats, e.g. a future standard, without loss of information. (See Bird & Simmons, 2003, for a related discussion.) Best Practices for Speech Resources In 2002, the Finnish IT center for science CSC, the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Turku began working on the project “Integrated resources for speech technology and spoken language research in Finland” funded by the Academy of Finland. The main objective of the project was to create a 1 http://www.tc37sc4. org/ maximally reusable language resource and tools. In practice, this meant creating a speech corpus (recordings and annotations) with editing and search tools that would suit the very different needs of phoneticians, speech technologists and conversation analysts. The main contributions of CSC in this three-year project are: 1. An annotation model with an annotation vocabulary and an exchange format 2. An annotation editor for speech corpora 3. A storage, discovery and delivery service for speech resources (speech corpora of recordings and annotations)