Controlled vocabulary in the speech flow
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Controlled vocabulary in the speech flow
Hi!
We have a question concerning the use of controlled vocabulary. For us, it would be very useful to use the controlled vocabulary in the same tiers as the general speech flow.
We would both like to insert a value from a set anywhere within typed text, and to append a label to a fragment of speech.
What we want to do, concretely, is to insert events like laughter, moaning and clicks in the same tier as the general speech flow. We would also like to append labels like "laughing" or "unclear" to words.
These events are not linguistic in the strict sense, but they definitely contribute with meaning to the discourse, just like words, and we therefore find it misleading to have them in a separate tier. I don't know whether you are familiar with Transcriber, but there this is possible.
Of course, we could make up our own conventions and agree on a set of events and ways to annotate them. But if we have to annotate these things manually over and over again, it will take much time, and it will also be easy to make mistakes.
If it is impossible to use the controlled vocabulary the way we wish to, do you know of any other way we could achieve what we want?
Kari
Re: Controlled vocabulary in the speech flow
Hi, as you give the example of using tags like 'laughing' from a controlled vocabulary, I would say it is more useful to keep those in a separate tier where you can mark the exact timespan of the laughing, instead of typing the tag as part of the transcription of the speech.
However, you could automatically combine the tier with the speech transcription and the tier with the controlled vocabulary non-speech events to a new tier in the end, for example if you would like to have both in a single tier for post-processing, statistics, subtitle display or similar for some reason.
Of course many of the latter can be done - often better - with the original separate tiers as well.
Regards, Eric
Re: Controlled vocabulary in the speech flow
In short: this is currently not possible. What is possible is to associate a tier with a controlled vocabulary and then "override" the dropdown list by holding down the shift key when double-clicking an annotation: the "free text" edit box appears. But this is rather contrary to what you want to do.
We can add this to the wish list (a CV that can be triggered when typing text in order to insert a value from the list at the caret's position).
-Han
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