## 2 Spoken Language Characteristics  
The basic unit of speech is an utterance. It is a spoken realization of the speaker's intent in the form of a speech signal. An utterance is transcribed into a literal segment, which is the written equivalent of the utterance. In this paper, we call this the literal transcription or literal form of the segment. A segment roughly corresponds to the concept of a sentence in written language. It is defined as a prosodically, semantically, and syntactically complete unit. Although most utterances correspond to \"complete sentences\", in some cases, speakers omit some information in their speech. The process of omitting some information is called ellipsis. The language technology practice recommends that the speech be transcribed in the standard written form, which follows grammatical rules and uses words from the dictionary of the standard language. For example, the literal segment in English \"it don't make no sense\" corresponds to \"it doesn't make any sense\" in the standard written form. The information about the use of double negation in spoken language is lost. Standard written form greatly distorts the true linguistic representation, which, for example, includes many sound reductions and several types of non-standard word forms. Hence, the user gets a very inaccurate impression of the discourse and an incomplete or incorrect impression of the linguistic representation of speech from the standard form alone. Therefore, transcriptions in many speech databases come in two forms: spoken (i.e., literal) and standard [1].  
Literal transcription is a form of orthographic transcription of speech that follows the general principle of \"writing exactly what you hear\". Standard transcription is a form of orthographic transcription where words are written following the conventions of the standard written language, reflecting how they would typically be spelled in formal language use.  
Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by about 2.5 million speakers. Most of them are the inhabitants of Slovenia. As Slovenia is part of the European Union, Slovenian is also one of its official languages. Spoken language characteristics, which we observed in the literal transcriptions of Slovenian speech, were:  
* Annotation of reductions:
* Sounds that were not pronounced were not transcribed. For example: tut (standard: tudi) (eng. also), mam (standard: imam) (eng. have).
* Semivowels were not transcribed. For example: mislm (standard: mislim) (eng. think), hitr (standard: hitro) (eng. fast), n\(\bar{\text{c}}\) (standard: nic) (eng. nothing).
* Word forms of the auxiliary verb \"to be\" were sometimes not pronounced completely. For example: ne b (standard: ne bi) (eng. will not), \(\bar{\text{c}}\)ev (standard: \(\bar{\text{c}}\)e bo) (eng. if he/she will).
* The letter \"1\" was often replaced with \"u\". For example: priseu (standard: prisel) (eng. come), videu (standard: videl) (eng. see).
* Pauses in the speech were transcribed. For example: eee, eem, been, nnn, mmm...
* Words that were not fully spoken were marked as word fragments. For example: lju (standard: ljudje) (eng. people), his (standard hisa) (eng. house).
* Punctuation marks were not present.
* Segments started with a lowercase letter.
* Abbreviations were written as they were pronounced. For example: erteve (standard RTV), tevetri (standard: TV3).  
Table 1 presents example segments from datasets used in our research. Datasets are further described in the continuation of the paper in Section 8.1.