In this paper, we describe version 2.0 of the SLäNDa corpus. SLäNDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue, now contains excerpts from 19 novels, written between 1809–1940. The main focus of the SLäNDa corpus is to distinguish between direct speech and the main narrative. In order to isolate the narrative, we also annotate everything else which does not belong to the narrative, such as thoughts, quotations, and letters. SLäNDa version 2.0 has a slightly updated annotation scheme from version 1.0. In addition, we added new texts from eleven authors and performed quality control on the previous version. We are specifically interested in different ways of marking speech segments, such as quotation marks, dashes, or no marking at all. To allow a detailed evaluation of this aspect, we added dedicated test sets to SLäNDa for these different types of speech marking. In a pilot experiment, we explore the impact of typographic speech marking by using these test sets, as well as artificially stripping the training data of speech markers.

We describe a new corpus, SLäNDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue. It contains Swedish literary fiction, which has been manually annotated for cited materials, with a focus on dialogue. The annotation covers excerpts from eight Swedish novels written between 1879–1940, a period of modernization of the Swedish language. SLäNDa contains annotations for all cited materials that are separate from the main narrative, like quotations and signs. The main focus is on dialogue, for which we annotate speech segments, speech tags, and speakers. In this paper we describe the annotation protocol and procedure and show that we can reach a high inter-annotator agreement. In total, SLäNDa contains annotations of 44 chapters with over 220K tokens. The annotation identified 4,733 instances of cited material and 1,143 named speaker–speech mappings. The corpus is useful for developing computational tools for different types of analysis of literary narrative and speech. We perform a small pilot study where we show how our annotation can help in analyzing language change in Swedish. We find that a number of common function words have their modern version appear earlier in speech than in narrative.