A System For Labeling Self-Repairs In Speech

Abstract

This document outlines a system for labeling self-repairs in spontaneous speech. The system marks the location and extent of a repair, as well as relevant words in the region of the repair. Together these labels determine the relationship between the “error” and the hypothesized “correction.” The system is designed to be able to capture distinctions among different repair patterns while remaining easy to learn, apply, and integrate into existing transcription formats. Although the system was originally developed to aid our research on automatic detection and correction of repairs (Shriberg, Bear, Dowding, 1992; Bear, Dowding, Shriberg, 1992), we hope that it may also prove useful for annotation of spontaneous speech data in related fields.