CORAL
The CORAL corpus was collected in the framework of a national
project sponsored by the PRAXIS XXI program, by a consortium formed by
INESC, CLUL, FLUL (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa), and
FCSH-UNL (Faculdade de Cincias Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova
de Lisboa). The purpose of this project is the collection of a spoken dialogue
corpus, with several levels of labelling: orthographic, phonetic,
phonological, syntactic and semantic.
- Linguistic contents
64 dialogues about a predetermined subject: maps. One of the
participants (giver) has a map with some
landmarks and a route drawn between them; the other (follower) has also landmarks, but no
route and consequently must reconstruct it. In order to elicit conversation,
there are small differences between the two maps: one of the landmarks
is duplicated in one map and single in the other; some landmarks are
only present in one of the maps; and some have slightly different
names in the two maps (e.g. curvas perigosas vs. troo
sinuoso ).
In the 16 different maps, the names of the landmarks were chosen to allow
the study of some connected speech phenomena:
- sequences with /l/ favouring or not its velarization
(e.g. sala malva, sal amargo)
- Sequences with /s/ in word final position followed by another coronal
fricative (e.g. barcos salva-vidas)
- Sequences of plosives formed across word boundaries (e.g.
clube de tiro)
- Sequences of obstruents formed within and across word boundaries
(e.g. bairros degradados)
The last three items were designed to allow a more comprehensive study
of consonant clusters formed within and across word boundaries and
should, therefore, be jointly investigated.
- Number and type of speakers
The 32 speakers were divided into 8 quartets
and, in each quartet, organized to take part in 8 dialogues.
Given the reduced number of speakers, they were chosen to achieve an
adequate balance of sexes, but were restricted in terms of age
(under-graduate or graduate students) and accent (Lisbon area).
Speakers are chosen in pairs who know each other, so that half of the
conversations take place between ``friends'' and half between people
who do not know each other.
- Data collection
The recordings take place in a sound proof room, with no visual
contact between the speakers. They wear close-talking microphones and
the recordings are made in stereo directly to DAT and later
down-sampled to 16 kHz per channel. No monitoring is done once the
dialogues start, after adjusting recording levels. The recording phase
is not yet complete.
- Annotation
A subset of the corpus will be annotated in several levels. Only orthographic transcription will be done for
the whole corpus.
