Spoken English Corpus
The Spoken English Corpus is a speech corpus collection of recordings of spoken British English compiled during 1984–1987. The corpus manual can be found on ICAME.
History
The Spoken English Corpus project was supported jointly in 1984-5 by the Humanities Research Fund at Lancaster University and by IBM Ltd, and subsequently by IBM UK Ltd. The project was supported by Geoffrey Leech at Lancaster and Geoffrey Kaye at IBM. The project was a collaboration, funded by IBM, between the Unit for Computer Research on the English Language at the University of Lancaster and the IBM Scientific Centre in Winchester.Compilation
SEC comprises 53 recorded passages, mainly from the BBC, spoken in the accent usually referred to as Received Pronunciation, or RP. The collection covers categories such as commentary, news broadcast, lecture, dialogue, poetry and propaganda. The corpus contains 52,637 words, totalling 339 minutes. The compilation of the corpus is described by Lita Taylor in her 1996 article "The Compilation of the Spoken English Corpus."Transcription
A system was devised for transcription of the intonation of the material in the recordings. Two transcribers, Gerry Knowles and Briony Williams, both supported by Lita Taylor, analysed the entire corpus. The transcription system is explained by Williams, and an experiment was conducted by Brian Pickering to assess the degree of agreement between the two transcribers on a section of the Corpus containing around 1000 tone-units which was transcribed by both transcribers. Good agreement was found.An important attribute of a modern corpus is that it is computer-readable: a corpus tends to reside on a hard disk than a bookshelf. In presenting the corpus in this book form, the authors have taken into account the needs of established corpus linguists, and of those who are not yet familiar with corpora. Anyone who has the corpus on disk can make hard copies of most of the files; but without a special font to print the prosodic symbols, the prosodic texts will be either unprintable or unreadable. For this reason the prosodic version has been chosen for publication.
The whole transcription in print was made in its present form by Peter Alderson, who later took over as Speech Research Manager at IBM. The volume was later entitled "A Corpus of Formal British English Speech: The Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus", and was first published by Longman in 1996, later by Routledge in 2013. The book is currently available from online bookstores including Routledge and Book Depository, or in electronic format from Google Play Books.
Other analyses
Grammatical tagging of each word, based on the CLAWS1 tagset, was added to the text of the SEC by an automatic process. The fact that this tagging was in machine-readable form made it possible to relate grammatical and prosodic information in the texts. Subsequent work used probabilistic models to develop further the grammatical tagging and to produce automatic parsing techniques.Anne Wichmann published her research on SEC intonation, "Intonation in Text and Discourse: Beginnings, middles, and ends" in 2000.