The Corpus of British Isles Spoken English (CoBISE)
Steven Coats · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2022
Corpora of transcribed regional speech are important for the study of dialects of English, but relatively few large corpora of transcribed naturalistic speech from the United Kingdom and Ireland exist. This paper presents the The Corpus of British Isles Spoken English (CoBISE), 112-million-word corpus of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts of YouTube videos from channels of councils and other government entities in the UK and Ireland. Transcripts are linked to publicly-available videos, so the corpus can also serve as a starting point for the study of multimodal phenomena. The paper describes the methods used for identifying relevant channels and the scripting pipeline for data collection and processing. Because ASR transcripts contain errors, analyses undertaken using the corpus should employ methods suitable for dealing with “noisy data”. Two possible approaches are described: for frequent phenomena, appropriate feature selection and use of robust classification models, and for rare phenomena, manual inspection of the audio/video data.