Annotating the HKCSE Pragmatically Martin Weisser Visiting Professor School of English and Education Guangdong University of Foreign Studies mail: martinweisser.org

Outline The Conversion Process Pre-processing Requirements Annotation & Post-processing Searching & Exploring the Corpus Conclusion

The Conversion Process I – Issues how to convert to DART XML format? –identify original conventions some documented in Cheng et al. (2008) some undocumented  –use tone unit marking? unfortunately tone units in Brazil’s system for ‘discourse intonation’ ≠ C-units  → no ‘sentence’ intonation inferable directly –remove prosodic information, apart from stress and tone movements, to ensure readability –handle overlap exact extent not marked or inferable  → better to delete –etc.

The Conversion Process II – Original Format

The Conversion Process III – the Conversion Editor original input file conversion result view conversion script editor save output

The Conversion Process IV – Conversion Results converted to DART XML format retained stress marking converted & moved tone marking converted ‘non-speech’ to comments added gender attribute added speaker type attribute moved pauses to next turn

Pre-processing Requirements creating new resources in/for DART –adapt DART modules to handle mixed case –‘synthesise’ domain-specific lexicon –create domain-specific topic ‘thesaurus’ pre-processing –fix conversion errors –identify/mark incomplete words –split turns –add punctuation, partly based on original prosodic features –etc.

Annotation & Post-processing I – Steps annotation in DART –fully automated –less than 80 sec for 24 files ~72,100 words ~10,300 C-Units Post-processing to fix potential errors on the levels of –syntax: potentially missing syntax rules –pragmatics: missing inferencing rules or modes (‘IFIDs’) –semantics: incorrectly identified topics

Annotation & Post-processing II – Annotation Result identified syntactic category automatically split off DM annotated identifiable speech acts

Searching the Corpus easily searchable via DART –speech act stats hyperlinked to concordancer –formulaic patterns or disfluencies via n-grams –manual searches in concordancer for specific speech acts syntactic categories + speech acts speech acts + speaker types speech acts + gender responses to questions searches for specific tone features

Conclusion DART annotation enriches the HKCSE through –adding syntactic and pragmatic annotation –ability to analyse features based on (functional) C- units, rather than intonation units –new search options based on the above features

References Cheng, W. Greaves, C. and Warren, M A Corpus- driven Study of Discourse Intonation: the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Weisser, M Annotating Dialogue Corpora Semi- Automatically: a Corpus-Linguistic Approach to Pragmatics. Unpublished Habilitation (professorial) thesis, University of Bayreuth. Weisser, M. 2012; forthcoming Pragmatic annotation. In: Aijmer, K. & Rühlemann, C. (Eds.). Corpus Pragmatics: a Handbook. Cambridge: CUP. Weisser, M The DART Manual. Weisser, M. (in progress). DART – the Dialogue Annotation and Research Tool.