Computational tools and spoken corpora design: an ongoing dialogue

The design of an oral corpus and the processes of registering, codifying and treating the materials in order to build a useful resource for linguistic analysis prompt numerous decisions regarding theory and methodology. This article is focused on those stages of corpus construction which are more clearly conditioned by the computational processing necessary to make it functional. In order to adequately match the initial expectations and the real possibilities of using the tool, each feature we intend to codify must be measured against the workload and the means required to do so. Therefore, it is essential to take into account the available possibilities of processing and exploitation as they have a crucial impact on decisions regarding the corpus’ construction. Based on experience acquired in the construction of the ESLORA corpus, the present article looks into some of the problems arising in the process of designing an oral corpus, such as the delicacy with which oral phenomena are represented, the segmentation of the discourse, the coexistence of different simultaneous tagging systems and the particularities of annotation in a bilingual or multilingual context.