Using Large Multi-purpose Corpora for Specific Research Questions: Discourse Phenomena Related to Wh-questions in the Spoken Dutch Corpus

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate whether a dataset derived from a multi-purpose corpus such as the Spoken Dutch Corpus may be considered appropriate for developing a taxonomy of wh-questions, and a model of the way in which these questions are integrated in spoken discourse. We compare the results obtained from the Spoken Dutch Corpus with a similar analysis of a large random collection of FAQs from the internet. We find substantial differences between the questions in spoken discourse and FAQs. Therefore, it may not be trivial to use a general purpose corpus as a starting point for developing models for human-computer interaction.