Switchboard in NXT

Links

Below is a summary of the links to relevant documentation (both websites and publications) describing the NXT system, the conversion of the Switchboard corpus to NXT, the Switchboard corpus itself and the annotations included in the NXT Switchboard corpus.

Corpus Overview

Calhoun, S., J. Carletta, J. Brenier, N. Mayo, D. Jurafsky, M. Steedman & D. Beaver (2010). The NXT-format Switchboard Corpus: A Rich Resource for Investigating the Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Prosody of Dialogue (pre-publication version). Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(4), 387-419, doi:10.1007/s10579-010-9120-1. Describes the corpus annotations, their representation in NXT, and aspects of the conversion process.

The NXT System

first port of call is the NXT website.
see also Carletta, J., S. Evert, U. Heid, and J. Kilgour (2005) The NITE XML Toolkit: data model and query. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal 39(4): 313-334.

Conversion of Annotations to NXT

Carletta, J., S. Dingare, M. Nissim, and T. Nikitina. (2004). Using the NITE XML Toolkit on the Switchboard Corpus to study syntactic choice: a case study. Fourth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.

Original Switchboard Release

Switchboard 1, release 2 (not NXT format) including documentation with a full description of the corpus, how the data was collected and transcribed and information about participants and recordings included in the original release

cite: Godfrey, J., E. Holliman, and J. McDaniel (1992). SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

Penn Treebank Project

Penn Treebank Project website

POS

general guidelines: Santorini, B. (1990). Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project, Technical Report MS-CIS-90-47, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania.
adaptions for Switchboard: Addendum to the POS Tagging Guidelines, LDC publication (n.d.).

Syntax

general Treebank II guidelines: Bies, A., M. Ferguson and R. MacIntyre (1995). Bracketing guidelines for Treebank II style. Ms., Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania.
adaptions for Switchboard: Taylor, A. (1996). Bracketing Switchboard: an addendum to the Treebank II Bracketing Guidelines, LDC publication.

Disfluency

Mateer, M. and A. Taylor (1995). Disfluency annotation stylebook for the Switchboard corpus. Ms, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania.

Mississippi State Switchboard Resegmentation Project

MS-State Switchboard Resegmentation Project website.
see also: Deshmukh, N., A. Ganapathiraju, A. Gleeson, J. Hamaker and J. Picone (1998). Resegmentation of Switchboard. in Proceedings of ICSLP, Sydney, Australia, pp. 1543-1546.

Annotations produced within NXT framework

Information Status:

Nissim, M., S. Dingare, J. Carletta, and M. Steedman. (2004). An Annotation Scheme for Information Status in Dialogue. Fourth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
Nissim, M. (2003). Annotation Scheme for Information Status in Dialogue. Internal publication, HCRC, University of Edinburgh.

Animacy:

A. Zaenen, J. Carletta, G. Garretson, J. Bresnan, A. Koontz-Garboden, T. Nikitina, M. C. O'Connor and T. Wasow (2004). Animacy Encoding in English: Why and How. ACL 2004 Workshop on Discourse Annotation, B. Webber and D. Byron (ed.), pp. 118-125.

Kontrast:

Calhoun, S., M. Nissim, M. Steedman and J. Brenier (2005). A Framework for Annotating Information Structure in Discourse, in 'Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky', ACL2005 Conference Workshop, Ann Arbor, MI.
Calhoun, S. (2006). Information Structure and the Prosodic Structure of English: a Probabilistic Relationship. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Chapter 5 contains details of the annotations, including annotator agreement.
Calhoun, S. (2005). Annotation Scheme for Discourse Relations in Paraphrase Corpus. Internal publication, ICCS, University of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh/Stanford Prosody:

Calhoun, S. (2006). Information Structure and the Prosodic Structure of English: a Probabilistic Relationship. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Chapter 5 contains details of the annotations, including annotator agreement.
Brenier, J. and S. Calhoun (2006). Switchboard Prosody Annotation Scheme. Internal publication, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University and ICCS, University of Edinburgh.

Converted Annotations

Dialog Acts:

Shriberg, E., R. Bates, A. Stolcke, P. Taylor, D. Jurafsky, K. Ries, N. Coccaro, R. Martin, M. Meteer, C. Van Ess-Dykema. (1998). Can Prosody Aid the Automatic Classification of Dialog Acts in Conversational Speech? In M. Swerts and J. Hirschberg (eds.) Special Double Issue on Prosody and Conversation. Language and Speech 41(3-4), 439-487.
Jurafsky, D. , E. Shriberg and D. Biasca (1997). Switchboard-DAMSL Labeling Project Coder's Manual. Technical Report 97-02, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado.

University of Washington Prosody:

Ostendorf, M., I. Shafran, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, B. Byrne and L. Carmichael (2001). A prosodically labeled database of spontaneous speech. In Proc. of the ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding, pp. 119-121, October 2001.