Design and development of an RDB version of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese
Hanae Koiso, Yasuharu Den, Ken'ya NISHIKAWA, Kikuo Maekawa · 2014
In this paper, we describe the design and development of a new version of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ), which is a largescale spoken corpus released in 2004.CSJ contains various annotations that are represented in XML format (CSJ-XML).CSJ-XML, however, is very complicated and suffers from some problems.To overcome this problem, we have developed and released, in 2013, a relational database version of CSJ (CSJ-RDB).CSJ-RDB is based on an extension of the segment and link-based annotation scheme, which we adapted to handle multi-channel and multi-modal streams.Because this scheme adopts a stand-off framework, CSJ-RDB can represent three hierarchical structures at the same time: inter-pausal-unit-top, clause-top, and intonational-phrase-top. CSJ-RDB consists of five different types of tables: segment, unaligned-segment, link, relation, and meta-information tables.The database was automatically constructed from annotation files extracted from CSJ-XML by using general-purpose corpus construction tools.CSJ-RDB enables us to easily and efficiently conduct complex searches required for corpus-based studies of spoken language.