Summary of the paper

Title Expanding Arabic Treebank to Speech: Results from Broadcast News
Authors Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies and Seth Kulick
Abstract Treebanking a large corpus of relatively structured speech transcribed from various Arabic Broadcast News (BN) sources has allowed us to begin to address the many challenges of annotating and parsing a speech corpus in Arabic. The now completed Arabic Treebank BN corpus consists of 432,976 source tokens (517,080 tree tokens) in 120 files of manually transcribed news broadcasts. Because news broadcasts are predominantly scripted, most of the transcribed speech is in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). As such, the lexical and syntactic structures are very similar to the MSA in written newswire data. However, because this is spoken news, cross-linguistic speech effects such as restarts, fillers, hesitations, and repetitions are common. There is also a certain amount of dialect data present in the BN corpus, from on-the-street interviews and similar informal contexts. In this paper, we describe the finished corpus and focus on some of the necessary additions to our annotation guidelines, along with some of the technical challenges of a treebanked speech corpus and an initial parsing evaluation for this data. This corpus will be available to the community in 2012 as an LDC publication.
Topics Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Grammar and Syntax, Parsing
Full paper Expanding Arabic Treebank to Speech: Results from Broadcast News
Bibtex @InProceedings{MAAMOURI12.557,
  author = {Mohamed Maamouri and Ann Bies and Seth Kulick},
  title = {Expanding Arabic Treebank to Speech: Results from Broadcast News},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  month = {may},
  date = {23-25},
  address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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