Date: Wednesday 1 March 2023
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: Online (via Zoom)
Speaker: Prof. Alexandra Vella
Linguistics Circle Seminar 01/03/2023 is being organised by the Institute of Linguistics & Language Technology at the University of Malta.
This event will be taking place online via Zoom with the following details:
- Meeting ID: 778 447 0068
- Passcode: 271457
Seminar Title: Designing and compiling a corpus of spoken Maltese
Abstract
This talk starts by presenting the rationale underlying compilation of this new spoken corpus in the context of a brief survey of a number of other existing speech/multimodal corpora of Maltese. Next, it describes the design of the KMM corpus, the data and metadata collection, the transcription efforts and current state-of-play in this regard as well as in preparation of both the audio files and orthographic transcriptions for eventual publication. It is a known fact that creating a spoken corpus is always more time- and effort- consuming than would be the case for a written corpus.
We discuss the challenges involved in the local Maltese context of trying to meet the different needs of creating a spoken corpus which, whilst it meets the requirement of some degree of balance and representativeness, will also be useful to as wide a range of potential users as possible (the general public, linguists and computational linguistics, the language technology industry etc.). The talk concludes with a discussion of our expectations for continuing work on this important project.