HNDS-I: A Collaborative Annotation System for Language Research

人与人之间的交流既发生在我们彼此交谈的时候，也发生在我们把事情写下来的时候。研究人们如何交流的研究人员可以很容易地获得许多书面材料的例子。书面材料也很容易分析，因为很容易扫描它供计算机使用或从互联网上下载。对口语进行研究要困难得多，因为录制语音并将这些录音转换为计算机可以使用的格式要困难得多，尤其是发生在自然情况下的语音，如家庭围坐在餐桌旁的谈话或教室里孩子们之间的争论。这个项目将建立一个新的系统，让研究人员和学生检查对话记录，并提供关于这些对话细节的额外数据，比如说话者的情绪，这些都是无法测量的。即将建立的新系统将成为卡内基梅隆大学TalkBank系统的一部分，该系统是世界上最大的公共语言研究数据库。TalkBank包括来自儿童、教室、双语者、第二语言学习者和语言障碍人士的34种不同语言的音频和视频录音，以及这些录音的书面记录。新系统将允许科学家和研究人员通过观察个人对话中的语言模式来研究人类交流，这是目前不可能实现的详细分析水平。在对话层面研究交流是很重要的，因为语言模式中的细节可以帮助回答一些重要的问题，比如人们如何在对话中解决困惑和误解。新系统将基于一个名为“协作评论”的概念，该概念允许研究小组和学生通过添加对话记录链接，直接向数据库中添加关于重要对话细节的评论，例如谈话者的动机。该系统还允许用户对尚未转录的媒体发表评论，并通过web浏览器界面创建新的转录本。该项目将通过公民科学让公众参与到数据中来，并通过引导性评论为语言和交流教学提供资源。这项工作的完成将为研究口语和交际打开一扇非凡的新窗口。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human communication happens both when we speak to each other and when we write things down. Researchers studying how people communicate can easily obtain many examples of written material. Written material is also easy to analyze because it is easy to scan it for computer use or to download it from the Internet. It is far more difficult to do research on spoken language because it is much harder to record speech and convert those recordings into a format a computer can use, especially speech that occurs in natural situations such as a family conversation around a dinner table or an argument between children in a classroom. This project will build a new system that will let researchers and students examine recorded conversations and provide additional data about details of those conversations, such as the talkers’ emotions, that cannot otherwise be measured.The new system to be built will be part of the TalkBank system at Carnegie Mellon University, the largest publicly accessible databank for the study of spoken language in the world. TalkBank includes audio and video recordings from children, classrooms, bilinguals, second language learners, and persons with language disorders in 34 different languages, together with written transcripts of those recordings. The new system will allow scientists and researchers to study human communication by looking at patterns of speech in individual conversations, which is a level of detailed analysis that is not currently possible. Studying communication at the conversation level is important because fine details in speech patterns can help answer important questions such as how people resolve confusion and misunderstandings as a conversation unfolds. The new system will be based on a concept called Collaborative Commentary, which allows research groups and students to add comments about important conversation details, such as talkers’ motivations, directly into the database by adding links to the conversation transcript. This same system will also permit users to provide comments on media that has not yet been transcribed and create new transcripts through a web browser interface. This project will engage the public with the data through Citizen Science and provide a resource for teaching about language and communication through guided commentary. Completion of this work will open up a remarkable new window to the study of spoken language and communication.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.