Structural Metadata Annotation of Speech Corpora: Comparing Broadcast News and Broadcast Conversations Jáchym KolářJan Švec University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic

J. Kolar and J. Svec2 Talk Overview Structural metadata annotation Speech data Statistics about fillers Statistics about edit disfluencies Statistics about sentence-like units Summary

J. Kolar and J. Svec3 Structural Metadata Extraction Metadata Extraction (MDE) research started as part of DARPA EARS program Metadata annotation scheme for MDE introduced by LDC (originally for English  we have extended it to Czech) ULTIMATE GOAL of MDE: Automatic conversion of raw speech recognition output to forms more useful to humans and downstream automatic processes

J. Kolar and J. Svec4 MDE Annotation Subtasks Boundaries of syntactic/semantic units (SUs) Statements, Interrogatives, Incompletes Coordination breaks, Clausal breaks Non-content words (fillers): Filled pauses (FPs) Discourse markers (DMs) Speech disfluencies (edits): Deletable regions (DelRegs), Interruption points, Explicit editing terms, Corrections

J. Kolar and J. Svec5 MDE Annotation Example but I you know really pre- uh prefer this form of of um presentation she Sheila told me on Tuesday no on Wednesday she didn’t so let’s move on because we don’t have uh don’t have time well do you like this this example but I you know really [pre-]* uh prefer this form [of]* of um presentation/. [she]* Sheila told me [on Tuesday]* no on Wednesday/, she didn’t/. so let’s move on/, because we [don’t have]* uh don’t have time/. well do you like [this]* this example/?

J. Kolar and J. Svec6 Goal of This Paper Analyse and compare two Czech MDE corpora from different domains in terms of metadata statistics Compare Czech Broadcast News (BN) vs. Broadcast Conversations (BC) Also compare Czech and English MDE corpora – English Broadcast News and Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS)

J. Kolar and J. Svec7 Czech Broadcast News Data News from 3 TV channels and 4 radio stations Both public and commercial broadcast companies Differing in presentation style 26 hours of transcribed speech ~ 300 speakers Speech recordings and verbatim transcripts publicly available from LDC

J. Kolar and J. Svec8 Broadcast Conversation Data 52 recordings of a Czech radio talk show – Radioforum 24 hours of transcribed speech ~ 100 speakers 1-3 guests spontaneously answer questions asked by 1-2 interviewers Mostly political debates Currently being extended by additional 20 recordings (~10 hours)

J. Kolar and J. Svec9 Statistics about Fillers Filled pauses more frequent in Czech Broadcast Conversations (3.8% of words) than in News (0.5%) English MDE: CTS – 2.2%, BN – 1.4% Discourse markers also more frequent in Czech Conversations (1.6%) than in News (0.1%) English MDE: CTS – 4.4%, BN – 0.5%

J. Kolar and J. Svec10 Statistics about Edit Disfluencies Deletable regions – 2.8% of words in Conversations and 0.2% in News English MDE: 5.4% in CTS and 1.5% in BN Percentage of disfluencies having a correction larger in News (94.6%) than in Conversations (83.8%) Explicit editing terms rare in both corpora – occur just at 4% of disfluencies

J. Kolar and J. Svec11 POS Analysis of Edit Disfluencies Tagged the Czech corpora employing an automatic POS tagger Czech uses structured tags with 15 positions; we only used the first position distinguishing 10 basic POS Computed and compared three POS distributions: 1)Whole corpus 2)Deletable regions only 3)Corrections only

J. Kolar and J. Svec12 POS Analysis of Edit Disfluencies

J. Kolar and J. Svec13 Statistics about SUs Average SU length: Conversations (14.5 words) shows longer SUs than News (13.0) English BN (12.5) similar to Czech, but CTS shows much shorter SUs (7.0) than Broadcast Conversations SU-internal breaks (clausal and coordination) more frequent in Conversations than in News (49% vs. 31% of all SU symbols)  Complex and compound sentences more common in spontaneous conversations than in prearranged news

J. Kolar and J. Svec14 Summary Broadcast Conversations contain significantly more fillers and disfluencies than News Conversations also show longer SUs and contain a higher number of complex sentences than News Deletable regions and corrections in both corpora show different POS distributions in comparison with the general POS distributions We plan to make Czech MDE corpora publicly available

Structural Metadata Annotation of Speech Corpora: Comparing Broadcast News and Broadcast Conversations Jáchym KolářJan Švec University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic