# _VivesDebate_: A New Annotated Multilingual Corpus of Argumentation in a Debate Tournament
## 3 Annotation Methodology
### Revision and Correction of Automatic Transcriptions  
The first task we performed was the revision of the automatic transcriptions of each debate. The duration of each debate was approximately 50 min. The annotators reviewed whether these automatic transcriptions corresponded to the audio recorded in the videos. Due to the time required to completely correct all the transcriptions, we decided to focus on the quality of the transcriptions corresponding to the ADUs in order to ensure the comprehensibility of the arguments presented during the debate and avoid misunderstandings, as a general criterion. The remaining text, which will not be part of the ADUs, was checked for inconsistencies or glaringly obvious errors. Regarding the specific criteria established, we agreed:  
1. To maintain the transcriptions of the different linguistic variants of the same language used in the original debates--Balearic, central and north-western Catalan and Valencian--as well as the use of words or expressions from other languages, but which are not normative, such as borrowings from Spanish and from English. It is worth noting that the eastern variants (Balearic and central Catalan) are the prevailing variants of the MLLP transcriber.
2. To correct spelling errors, such as \"autonoma' instead of 'autonoma/autonomous' (missing accent), \"penalitzar vos' instead of 'penalitzar-vos/penalize you' (missing hyphen).
3. To amend those words that were not correctly interpreted by the automatic transcriber, especially wrongly segmented words. For instance, \"debature/to debate' instead of 'debatra/he or she will debate', or \"desig de separa/the desire to (he/she) separates' instead of 'desig de ser pare/the desire to be a father'. In the first example, the automatic transcription does not correctly interpret the tense and person of the verb, and in the second example it wrongly interprets as a single word ('separa') two different words'ser pare', probably due to the elision of 'r' when we pronounce'ser' and due to the confusion that can be caused by the Catalan unstressed vowels 'a' and 'e', which in some linguistic variants are pronounced the same way. Most of these errors are related to homophonous words or segments, which the automatic transcriber cannot distinguish correctly, and are also probably due to the different linguistic variants of the same language used in the debates (Balearic, central and north-western Catalan and Valencian).
4. To follow the criteria established by the linguistic portal of the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation ([[http://esadir.cat/](http://esadir.cat/)]([http://esadir.cat/](http://esadir.cat/)), accessed on 2 August 2021) for spelling the names of persons, places, demonyms, and so forth.
5. To capture and write down the main ideas in those cases in which the quality of the audio does not allow us to understand part of the message conveyed.
6. Noisy sounds and hesitations (e.g.,'mmm', 'eeeeh'), self-corrections (e.g.,'metode arlt alternatiu/arlt alternative method') and repetitions ('el que fa el que fa es ajudar/what it does it does is to help') are not included because they do not provide relevant information for computational tasks focused on argumentation.  
The data that are automatically transcribed and manually reviewed appear in plain text format without punctuation marks and without capital letters. The revision of the automatic transcriptions took us an average of two hours for each debate, even though we performed a superficial revision of those fragments of text in which ADUs were not present. Therefore, this type of revision is undoubtedly a time-consuming task.