Spock - a Spoken Corpus Client

Abstract

Spock is an open source tool for the easy deployment of time-aligned corpora. It is fully web-based, and has very limited server-side requirements. It allows the end-user to search the corpus in a text-driven manner, obtaining both the transcription and the corresponding sound fragment in the result page. Spock has an administration environment to help manage the sound files and their respective transcription files, and also provides statistical data about the files at hand. Spock uses a proprietary file format for storing the alignment data but the integrated admin environment allows you to import files from a number of common file formats. Spock is not intended as a transcriber program: it is not meant as an alternative to programs such as ELAN, Wavesurfer, or Transcriber, but rather to make corpora created with these tools easily available on line. For the end user, Spock provides a very easy way of accessing spoken corpora, without the need of installing any special software, which might make time-aligned corpora corpora accessible to a large group of users who might otherwise never look at them.

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