Testing the adequacy of query languages against annotated spoken dialog
Steve Cassidy, Pauline Welby, Julie McGory, Mary E. Beckman · 2000
ABSTRACT: Large annotated collections of speech data are now common in spoken language research and a recent focus has been on the development of annotation standards and query languages for these annotations As part of this process it is important to evaluate the emerging proposals against a range of Linguistic annotation practices and in many different domains. This paper presents an example of a richly annotated discourse segment which includes both DAMSL style discourse level annotation and ToBI intonational analysis. We describe how this annotation could be realised in either the Emu, MATE or Annotation Graph formalisms. In order to evaluate the different query languages we take a small number of queries and attempt to express them in each query language. We are particularly interested in the naturalness of the query expression in each case. In some cases we find that queries cannot be expressed in the current language. We make a number of suggestions to guide the development of these query languages.