Annotating a corpus of human interaction with prosodic profiles — focusing on Mandarin repair/disfluency

Abstract

This study describes the construction of a manually annotated speech corpus that focuses on the sound profiles of repair/disfluency in Mandarin conversational interaction. Specifically, the paper focuses on how the tag set of prosodic profiles of the recycling repair culled from both audio-tapped and video-tapped, face-to-face Mandarin interaction are decided. By the methodology of both acoustic records and impressionistic judgements, 260 instances of Mandarin recycling repair are annotated with sound profiles including: pitch, duration, loudness, silence, and other observable prosodic cues (i.e. sound stretch and cut-offs). The study further introduces some possible applications of the current corpus, such as the implementation of the annotated data for analyzing the correlation between sound profiles of Mandarin repair and the interactional function of the repair. The goal of constructing the corpus is to facilitate an interdisciplinary study that concentrates on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by simultaneously paying close attention to the sound profiles emerged from interaction.

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