Guy Aston Compiling a corpus of transcribed speech

Anyqs  A corpus for classroom use in training interpreters  Transcribed spontaneous speech (hard to come by)  Understandable without detailed contextual information (standard format)  Contemporary  Quite a lot (currently 1.2M words)  Easy to encode in TEI and to index with XAIRA

No way is this publicly available  The BBC site contains transcripts of all Any Questions programmes in the last 3 years, which you can download freely for personal non- commercial use.  But/and you cannot adapt, alter or create a derivative work except for your own personal, non-commercial use.

What the BBC’s original looks like …  PRESENTER: Jonathan Dimbleby PANELLISTS: Lord Falconer Malcolm Rifkind Anne McElvoy Chris Huhne FROM: Medical Women's Federation, Central London DIMBLEBY Welcome to London where we are on the edge of Regent's Park at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Our host here is the Medical Women's Federation, which is holding its 90th anniversary conference here. With its origins in the late 19th Century the federation was in 1917 formed with an initial membership of 190 women doctors. Subjects at the top of their agenda then: Medical women engaged in war and the contemporary challenges of venereal diseases, prostitution, maternity and infant welfare. Plus ca change. Except that today more than half the present crop of medical students are women and the federation's main aim is to keep women doctors active in the medical workforce with all that that implies for part-time training and child welfare. On our panel: the former Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer. Lord Falconer there have been scurrilous reports in some of the newspapers to the effect that you're not happy with your pension and that you want it to be doubled, it's £52,000 a year, we can presume that you are quite happy yes? FALCONER I think I'd rather not talk about that, if you don't mind Jonathan. DIMBLEBY You're entirely free not to talk about that which suggests that it's unresolved. The former Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind; Chris Huhne who wants to be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats - do you like being the underdog? HUHNE I'm not sure, I think - I'm working on it, I'm ambitious not to be the underdog Jonathan. DIMBLEBY And Anne McElvoy, executive editor and columnist at the Evening Standard. [CLAPPING] Our first question please. HICKS Tom Hicks. Should Ian Blair resign?

Marking it up in XML…  In the Header  Programme details  Participants and roles  Setting  In the Text  Topic boundaries (new question)  Utterance boundaries and their speakers  Sentence boundaries (based on punctuation in transcript)  Non-verbal events (clapping, laughter, coughs)  Tokenisation - ’s  Pos tagging – maybe some day …  Alignment with audio – maybe some day ???

Overall document structure Any questions [Date] [Profile] [Text]

Profile <person who=“name” sex =“f | m” role = “presenter | questioner | party | profession”> fullname wherefrom

Text Welcome to London … … And Anne McElvoy, executive editor and columnist at the Evening Standard. Our first question please. Tom Hicks. Should Ian Blair resign? …

Things to do with it (1): emphasis Agreement (most frequent adverb collocates 1L)  Agree (773) Entirely / actually / rather / completely / absolutely / broadly / strongly / totally / certainly / quite  Disagree (110) Fundamentally / profoundly / strongly / completely

Things to do with it (2): subjunctives in speech  It were (189)  As it were (152)  If it were (30)  I wish it were (3)

Things to do with it (3): As it were A particularly Any Questions feature? A particularly male one?  Any Questions  Male speakers / 1000 sentences  Female speakers / 1000 sentences  BNC  Male speakers / 1000 sentences  Female speakers / 1000 sentences

Things to do with it (4): Preferred lexis of patriotism? occurrences/1000 UK –Lab 40 6 ‰ –Con 122 ‰ –Lib 225 ‰ –(Ukip17 ‰) United Kingdom –Lab 172 ‰ –Con 223 ‰ –Lib 123 ‰ –(Ukip0-) occurrences/1000 Britain –Lab 9414 ‰ –Con ‰ –Lib 5012 ‰ –(Ukip858 ‰)

Thank you!  for any answers on how to get permission …

Utterances / Sentences Role Lab 2141 / 6845 Con 1787 / 6309 Lib 1096 / 4098 Presenter 7936 / Questioner 1180 / 2241 Other 3144 / Sex Male / Female 2575 / 8295 Unknown 39 / 70 Total / 44346