Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools A special issue of Speech Communication

CALL FOR PAPERS

Aims and Scope of Speech Communication (from the journal homepage)

Speech Communication is an interdisciplinary journal whose primary objective is to fulfil the need for the rapid dissemination and thorough discussion of basic and applied research results. In order to establish frameworks to inter-relate results from the various areas of the field, emphasis will be placed on viewpoints and topics of a transdisciplinary nature. ... The journal's primary objectives are: to present a forum for the advancement of human and human-machine speech communication science; to stimulate cross-fertilization between different fields of this domain; to contribute towards the rapid and wide diffusion of scientifically sound contributions in this domain. General information about Speech Communication, the official journal of the European Speech Communication Association, can be found at www.elsevier.com/locate/specom.

Scope of the Special Issue

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Speech Communication on Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools. The aim of the special issue is to make speech scientists aware of recent developments in the representation and management of annotated speech corpora, i.e. collections of speech signal data with time-aligned transcriptions. (Signal data may be audio or physiological, natural or artificial, in basic or derived form.) The primary focus is the structure of annotations and of annotated corpora, as used within and across a wide range of disciplines concerned with spoken human communication.

Annotated speech corpora have been a critical component of research in the speech sciences for some years. Today, these corpora are being created and deployed for a rapidly expanding set of languages, disciplines and technologies. A wealth of formats and tools have sprung up around this enterprise, a diversity which at once facilitates and frustrates progress. The linguistic annotation page has drawn attention to the scale of ongoing activity, to the existence of diverse approaches to similar problems and of similar approaches to diverse problems. Despite the explicit formats and well-documented user interfaces, insights about the structure of the annotations themselves are often buried in coding manuals and internal data structures. There is a pressing need for papers which document the corpora and tools, which identify notational and functional equivalences among different approaches, and which report on new approaches to core representational problems.

The special issue will consider papers which address theoretical and practical issues concerning the representation of annotations, the structure of annotated corpora, and the design, analysis and implementation of tools for creating, browsing, searching, manipulating and transforming annotations and annotated corpora. In each case, the description of annotation structures or tools should be accessible to readers outside the particular community in which the system originated.

A broad sampling of relevant issues is given below:

representational issues:

• sequence, overlap, hierarchy
• simultaneous cross-cutting hierarchies
• the nature of labels
• pointers and cross-references
• temporal structure, instants and periods
• atemporal information (e.g. demographic data)

relationships between annotations and signals:

• multiple independent annotations of a single signal
• single annotations which reference multiple signals
• annotations which reference other annotations

database issues:

• structuring annotations, signals and atemporal data into a corpus
• indexing for efficient access of large corpora
• high and low level query languages, cross-level query
• validation, update, provenance
• data transformation and integration
• file formats, storage, transfer; the place of XML

implementation issues:

• design philosophies and functionalities for annotation toolkits
• approaches to creation, browsing, navigation, display
• reusability, interoperability, platform independence
• integration with independent tools (e.g. statistical analysis)
• techniques for working with multiple corpus formats

wider issues:

• methodologies for research and development involving annotated corpora
• the cycle of refining annotations and refining theoretical models
• the role of annotated corpora in evaluating theories and systems
• necessary steps towards general purpose tools and formats

Important Dates

• 400 Word Abstracts: any time in May-July
• Advance Notification: Monday August 16th, 1999
• Submission Deadline: Monday August 30th, 1999
• Acceptance Decision: late October, 1999
• Final Version Due: late January, 2000
• Publication Date: mid 2000

Advance Notifications

1. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a 400 word abstract of their paper so that the editors can comment on its suitability for the special issue. These abstracts should be formatted as ASCII text and submitted by email to both editors.
2. To facilitate a rapid review process, authors are required to give notification of their submission two weeks in advance of the submission deadline. Notification should consist of the title and (a draft of) the final abstract, formatted as ASCII and emailed to both editors.

Submissions

All submissions must consist of original unpublished work that is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should be approximately 30 pages double spaced. In the case of hardcopy submission, four single-sided copies should be sent. In the case of electronic submission (our preference), PDF format should be emailed as a MIME attachment. Please contact the editors concerning any other formats or transfer methods.

Please register below to receive email notification of any subsequent announcements concerning the special issue.

Addresses for Correspondence and Submissions

Dr Jonathan Harrington
Director, Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre,
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Tel: +61 2 9850-8740  Fax: +61 2 9850-9199

Dr Steven Bird
Associate Director, Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania, 3615 Market St, Suite 200
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608, USA
Tel: +1 215 573-3352  Fax: +1 215 573-2175

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