The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus

Ghattas Eid, Esther Seyffarth, Ingo Plag

Abstract
This paper presents the first electronic speech corpus of Maaloula Aramaic, an endangered Western Neo-Aramaic variety spoken in Syria. This 64,845-word corpus is available in four formats: (1) transcriptions, (2) lemmatized transcriptions, (3) audio files and time-aligned phonetic transcriptions, and (4) an SQLite database. The transcription files are a digitized and corrected version of authentic transcriptions of tape-recorded narratives coming from a fieldwork trip conducted in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s (Arnold, 1991a, 1991b). They contain no annotation, except for some informative tagging (e.g. to mark loanwords and misspoken words). In the lemmatized version of the files, each word form is followed by its lemma in angled brackets. The time-aligned TextGrid annotations consist of four tiers: the sentence level (Tier 1), the word level (Tiers 2 and 3), and the segment level (Tier 4). These TextGrid files are downloadable together with their audio files (for the original source of the audio data see Arnold, 2003). The SQLite database enables users to access the data on the level of tokens, types, lemmas, sentences, narratives, or speakers. The corpus is now available to the scientific community at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6496714.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.699
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6513–6520
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.699
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ghattas Eid, Esther Seyffarth, and Ingo Plag. 2022. The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6513–6520, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus (Eid et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.lrec-1.699.pdf
PDF Search