A Multimedia Database for Colloquial English from Closed-captioned Videodiscs

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This study has compiled a multimedia database for colloquial English. The multimedia database retrieves sentences containing arbitrary keywords from a vast number of film scripts stored on a hard disk and then seeks the corresponding scenes on videodiscs which contain encoded subtitles (closed captions). Currently the total amount of words recorded in the multimedia database is more than 1,000,000 words, exceeding the London-Lund Corpus's 500,000 words.The innovative feature of this multimedia database is its ability to link orthographic transcriptions with the corresponding scenes on closed-captioned videodiscs. These types of videodiscs allow the simultaneous presentation of letters, sounds and images on a TV monitor. With a mere glance at a scene from a videodisc, the context of the speech event can be easily understood even by non-native speakers of English.The multimedia database constitutes a basic source of information for those engaged in teaching English as a second language. It serves as an infrastructure for studies in colloquial English and provides some insight into language performance. Such new types of database will open up new areas of research that have not previously been possible. The following report describes the methodology used to make the multimedia database and evaluates its usefulness for studies of colloquial English.