Towards a Corpus of Spoken Maltese: Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem, KMM

Alexandra (Sandra) Vella, Sarah Agius, Aiden Williams, Claudia Borg


Abstract
This paper presents the rationale for a “dedicated” corpus of spoken Maltese, Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem, KMM, ‘Corpus of Spoken Maltese’, based on the concept of a gold-standard Core collection. The Core collection is designed to cater to as wide a variety of user needs as possible whilst respecting basic principles governing corpus design, such as representativeness and balance, and delivering high quality in terms of both audio quality and annotations. An overview is provided of the composition of the current Core corpus of around 20 hours of data and of the human annotation effort involved. We also carry out a small qualitative analysis of the output of a Maltese ASR system and compare it to the human annotators’ output. Initial results are promising, showing that the ASR is robust enough to generate first-pass texts for annotators to work on, thus reducing the human effort, and consequently, the cost involved.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1420
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
16343–16352
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1420
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandra (Sandra) Vella, Sarah Agius, Aiden Williams, and Claudia Borg. 2024. Towards a Corpus of Spoken Maltese: Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem, KMM. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16343–16352, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Corpus of Spoken Maltese: Korpus tal-Malti Mitkellem, KMM (Vella et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1420.pdf