A. Lacheret P. Pietrandrea, O. Baude, N. Obin, A.C Simon, A. Tchobanov (2019). Collecting data for the Rhapsodie Treebank: typological criteria and ethical issues

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the development of the Rhapsodie repository. We describe the selection of data to be annotated, the principles used to document the data and discuss the theoretical assumptions underlying the Rhapsodie project. The aim was to provide a corpus to study the interface between discourse, syntax, and prosody in French and the variation of intonosyntactic features according to discourse genre in the marking of informational structure as well as expressivity in unelicited speech. At the beginning of the Rhapsodie project such data were under-represented and the need for spoken corpora of this type in French was strongly felt. Consequently, several challenges had to be addressed. First, we discuss the different obstacles and challenging questions we faced with respect to the development of a well-balanced corpus of different discourse genres produced in different speech situations, such as the nature of the data and the type of information to include in the metadata. Then, we present the sources from which the samples were extracted, legal and ethical issues, and the methodology adopted to encode the metadata.

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
Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank
Corpus design and ethical issues
Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Paola Pietrandrea, Olivier Baude,
Nicolas Obin, Anne-Catherine Simon and Atanas Tchobanov
is chapter is devoted to the development of the Rhapsodie repository. We
describe the selection of data to be annotated, the principles used to document
the data and discuss the theoretical assumptions underlying the Rhapsodie
project. e aim was to provide a corpus to study the interface between
discourse, syntax, and prosody in French and the variation of intonosyntactic
features according to discourse genre in the marking of informational structure
as well as expressivity in unelicited speech. At the beginning of the Rhapsodie
project such data were under-represented and the need for spoken corpora of
this type in French was strongly felt. Consequently, several challenges had to be
addressed. First, we discuss the dierent obstacles and challenging questions
we faced with respect to the development of a well-balanced corpus of dierent
discourse genres produced in dierent speech situations, such as the nature
of the data and the type of information to include in the metadata. en, we
present the sources from which the samples were extracted, legal and ethical
issues, and the methodology adopted to encode the metadata.
. Introduction
While text typology is widespread in linguistic studies of written text, this eld is
currently still in its infancy in speech studies. When present, it is mainly conducted
from a comparative approach of written and spoken texts in the English language
(Halliday 1989; Biber etal. 1999), focusing on the segmental level (phonological,
syntactic, or lexical). Rhapsodie follows on from work that aims to extend the scope
of textual typology to spoken discourse focusing on the intonosyntactic interface,
that is, analyzing correlations between types of text and variations in prosodic and
syntactic constructions. Such a program needs a set of data that is as diverse as
possible in order to process a sucient variety of text types and discourse genres.

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 Anne Lacheret-Dujour et al.
is chapter addresses the dierent issues related to achieving this diversity
in the Rhapsodie project. Aer a presentation of the hypotheses that inspired the
corpus design and a reminder of the context of existing speech corpora studies
(Section2), we rst present issues related to sampling (size, type and number of
samples) and the strategy used to achieve the corpus design in order to ensure
that a sucient variety of text types and linguistic structures is represented
(Section3). Lastly, we discuss the legal and ethical implications of the distribution
of the Rhapsodie resources, as well as the metadata standard used to provide an
exhaustive textual characterization of each sample, to provide complete informa-
tion about source corpora and to precisely describe the annotation of each sample,
which is at the heart of the Rhapsodie project (Section4).
. Purpose, method and context
In this section, we rst discuss the linguistic theoretical and empirical assump-
tions concerning correlations between situational context, discourse genres, types
of text and structural variations that inspired the data collection in Rhapsodie
(Section2.1). en we present details of this collection with respect to previous
projects in speech corpora (Section2.2).
. eoretical approach
In the collection of our data we followed Biber et al.’s (1999: 4) approach to
corpus design which holds that “[t]he vocabulary and grammar that we use to
communicate are inuenced by a number of factors, such as the reason for the
communication, the context, the people with whom we are communicating, and
whether we are speaking or writing”. In other words we assumed that a strict rela-
tion exists between textual typologies– i.e. textual patterns dened in intrinsically
linguistic terms– and genres– i.e. socio-communicative patterns– in that a par-
ticular linguistic structure reects a particular genre, and vice versa a given genre
engenders a limited number of linguistic structures (Bakhtine 1984; Swales 1990;
Maingueneau 1996; Adam 1999).1 As for the specic objectives of our research,
we assumed that a correlation exists between discourse types and the distribution
of intonosyntactic structures, and hence that a corpus comprising a wide range of
discourse types would also comprise a wide range of intonosyntactic structures.
. See also the notion of ‘register’ in Biber and Conrad (2009: 16) dened by a bundle of lexico-
grammatical features that are frequent and pervasive in texts from a given variety, and that serve
important communicative functions.

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Chapter1. Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank 
. Previous projects
e majority of existing treebanks are not diversied with regard to discourse genres.
e Verbmobil treebanks of English, German, and Japanese (Hinrichs etal. 2000),
for example, only comprise samples of spontaneous conversations; the Spoken
French Ester treebank (Cerisara etal. 2010) is exclusively based on transcripts of
French radio news broadcasts; the Venice treebank (Delmonte etal. 2007) includes
only (regionally diversied) Italian conversations and the Switchboard corpus
(Meteer etal. 1995), only telephone conversations. e design of the CHRISTINE
treebank (Rahman & Sampson 2000) aimed at providing a more diversied and
balanced sampling based on extracts from the “demographically-sampled” speech
section of the British National Corpus. While this design choice guaranteed a socio-
linguistic diversication of the corpus, it did not ensure a text type diversication.
However, particular attention to including structural variety in the design of
the corpus was paid by the creators of C-ORAL-ROM (Cresti & Moneglia 2005)
and by those of the British component of the International Corpus of English
(Nelson etal. 2002), the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (Aarts
& Wallis 2006) and the CGN Spoken Dutch Corpus (Schuurman etal. 2004). e
C-ORAL-ROM sampling is based on the following sets of variation parameters:
(i) Dialogical structure (monologues, dialogues, conversations); (ii) Social domain
of use (family, private life, public life, media productions); (iii) Gender variation;
(iv) Formal vs. informal distinction; (v) Speaker parameters (Age, Sex, Education,
and Occupation). e British component of the International Corpus of English
(Nelson etal. 2002), the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (Aarts
& Wallis 2006), and the CGN Spoken Dutch Corpus (Schuurman etal. 2004) are
all based on the sampling principles established by the International Corpus of
English that recommends including in the corpus equal proportions of mono-
logues and dialogues, public and private speech, scripted and unscripted speech.
While our work was largely grounded in these previous projects, we intro-
duced some renements. We decided to replace the C-ORAL-ROM distinction
between formal and informal speech and between dierent genres by a less subjec-
tive multifactorial analysis of the speech situation. We encountered a diculty,
however. While spoken treebanks were extracted from existing representative
corpora, or at least built within the framework of large projects dealing with
corpus construction, the creation of the Rhapsodie repository could not rely on
any representative corpus of spoken French, since none exists; nor could we, in
the scope of this project, count on enough time and money to collect a corpus
from scratch. is peculiar situation led us to construct our textually diversied
repository of samples partly by extracting samples from a number of relatively
small and specic pre-existing spoken corpora of French.

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 Anne Lacheret-Dujour et al.
. Rhapsodie sampling
is section is devoted rst to the presentation of the dierent situational variables
selected for the construction and the description of the Rhapsodie repository, and
second to the presentation of the dierent sources of the Rhapsodie collection.
. Rhapsodie corpus design: General principles
It is well known that discourse genres can be described as multifactorial phenom-
ena involving a number of socio-communicative variables that are independent
of one another (Biber etal. 1999; Koch & Oesterreicher 2001). A given discourse
genre, for example, can be described in terms of the nature of the speech situation
(its location, its goals, the degree of formality), in terms of the physical constraints
impacting on the speech situation (in particular the type of communication chan-
nel), or in terms of the topic, i.e. the semantic content of the exchange. e design
of the Rhapsodie corpus (Table1) was rst of all based on the balance between
monologues and dialogues. Monologues (M) are discourses produced by a single
speaker addressed to interlocutors who could not freely take a speech turn (whether
a large audience or a single addressee); Dialogues (D) are discourses produced by
two or more speakers in a situation of either low or high interactivity. By including
both monologues and dialogues in our corpus, we were able to take into account
in the development of our annotations a number of phenomena typically related
to interaction such as overlaps, turn-taking or interactional discourse markers.
Secondly, we distinguished between private and public speech.2 Private speech
(Rhap-M0 and M1 or Rhap-D0 and D1) is composed of samples extracted either
from face-to-face interviews between the linguist researcher and one or more
French speakers, or from everyday life interactions; private speech may cover any
topic. In Public speech (Rhap-M2 or Rhap-D2), the speaker addresses an audience
(conferences, radio or television broadcasts: political speeches or debates, talk
shows, scientic press, reportage, forecasts, literary programs, etc.). Finally, we also
took into account the degree of planning of the speech (spontaneous or planned),
the degree of interactivity (interactive, semi-interactive, non-interactive), the
channel of communication (broadcast or face-to-face), the type of discourse se-
quence mostly characterizing the speech (description, argumentation, procedures,
. See for example the distinction between “communication privée” and “communication
publique” in Koch and Oesterreicher (2001: 586).

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Chapter1. Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank 
etc.– see Adam 1999),3 and the type of task (interviews, sermons, sportscasting,
movie scene description, travel planning, etc.).4
Table1 summarizes the types of situational variables that were taken into ac-
count in the construction of the Rhapsodie corpus.
Table1. Situational variables in Rhapsodie
Event structure Monologue, dialogue
Social context Private, Public
Planning Spontaneous, semi-spontaneous, planned
Interactivity Interactive, semi-interactive, non-interactive
Channel Broadcast; face-to-face
Discourse sequence Argumentation, narration, description, procedural speech, oratory
speech
Task Info-kiosk, sermon, lesson, project description…
In order to maximize the diversity of speakers, we decided to include in our corpus
a large number of short speech samples uttered by 89 Central French adult native
speakers (males and females) from the early eighties to nowadays, making a total
of 57 short audio samples (5 minutes long on average),5 amounting to 3 hours of
speech and a 33,000-word corpus.
. Gathering data: External and internal sources
Gathering new data with the aim of building a diversied collection of textual
samples would have been too costly and time-consuming for a project whose
primary aim was to develop tools for the annotation and analysis of spoken
French. As mentioned, we therefore preferred to build the bulk of our corpus (32
samples) by selecting data from 7 corpora of spoken French created in recent years
for various scientic projects. Table 2 details the 7 external source corpora that
were drawn on for the Rhapsodie reservoir: CFPP2000, C-Prom, ESLO, PFC, the
Avanzi Corpus, the Lacheret Corpus, and the Mertens Corpus.
. It is well known that labeling dierent types of discourse sequences is complex and to a cer-
tain extent arbitrary, as a given production can be associated to dierent kinds of sequences. For
example, a narration is oen descriptive and a description is rarely neutral, and oen contains
argumentative features; when this is not the case, it is considered as a procedural sequence (map
task for example).
. e vocabulary adopted to dene these properties is that of the IMDI standard (Section4).
. e samples were randomly extracted from original sources.

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Table2. External source corpora used in Rhapsodie
Source Description Number
of samples
Samples
CFPP2000 e CFPP2000 (Le Corpus de Français Parlé
Parisien) is made up of interviews about Paris
districts and suburbs. It provides data to study
Parisian French as it is used in real communica-
tion (Branca-Roso etal. 2012) <http://cfpp2000.
univ-paris3.fr/>
4 D0001, D0002,
D0004, D0006
Avanzi
Corpus
e Avanzi Corpus was collected for the
intonosyntactic study of macrosyntactic phenom-
ena conducted by Mathieu Avanzi for his PhD
dissertation at the University of Neuchatel, 2011
(Avanzi 2012)
19 M0001, M0003–
M0017, D0007,
D0008, D0020
Lacheret
Corpus
e Lacheret Corpus was compiled by Anne
Lacheret for research purposes, and focuses on
the continuous and functional modeling of French
prosody (Lacheret 2003)
2 D2004, D2005
Mertens
Corpus
e Mertens Corpus was compiled by Piet
Mertens for his doctoral dissertation. Mertens’
dissertation was the rst approach to the intono-
syntactic modeling of French developed with
the aim of constructing an automatic system of
identication of intonational units (Mertens 1987)
2 D2001, D2009
C-Prom C-Prom is an aligned and annotated corpus
developed with the aim of studying syllable
prominences in French. It comprises 24 record-
ings representing 7 dierent genres produced
by French, Belgian and Swiss native speakers of
French (Avanzi etal. 2010) <http://sites.google.
com/site/corpusprom>
1 M2001
ESLO ESLO, L’Enquête Sociolinguistique à Orléans
is a 300-hour, 4,500,000 word corpus of
spoken French gathered in Orleans, France in
1969–71 with a sociolinguistic aim. It includes
157 interviews and more than 200 recordings of
spontaneous private and professional conversa-
tions, telephone exchanges, public meetings, and
service encounters <http://eslo.tge-adonis.fr>
(Eshkol-Taravella etal. 2011)
1 D1001

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Chapter1. Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank 
Table2. (continued)
Source Description Number
of samples
Samples
PFC e international project Phonologie du français
contemporain, directed by Marie-Hélène Côté
(University of Ottawa), Jacques Durand (ERSS,
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail), Bernard Laks
(MoDyCo, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre
la Défense), Ch. Lyche (Oslo University) aims to
obtain an accurate picture of both the similarity
and diversity of phonetic varieties of contem-
porary spoken French. e elements of the PFC
database which were used for Rhapsodie sampling
are directed conversations between a subject
and an interviewer and informal conversations
between two persons belonging to a dense social
network. <http://www.projet-pfc.net/> (Durand
etal. 2009)
3 D0003, D0005,
D0009
It should be noted that most of the Rhapsodie samples are shorter (by between 1
to 10 minutes) than the original source les. Our aim of maximizing the variety of
text types and speakers led us to select only a portion of the source le6 in order
to include in our reservoir a large number of short samples produced by many
speakers. We realize that this choice, which allows for ne-grained and complete
intonosyntactic analyses of each sample, is not perfectly suitable for complex se-
mantic textual analyses. However, as will be shown in Section4, users can retrieve
the whole original source les through an identier that is given in the metadata
associated with each sample.
In order to guarantee the representativeness of all the situational variables
listed in Section3, we also collected 27 original samples. Table3 details the three
original subcorpora collected for the Rhapsodie reservoir.
. We decided to collect samples uttered by a large number of speakers, not in order to achieve
good socio-linguistic representativeness (which was not our objective), but to minimize the
eects of individual idiosyncrasies.

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Table3. Internal sources created for the Rhapsodie project
Subcorpora Description Number
of samples
Samples
Movie descrip-
tion Corpus
e Movie description corpus comprises 7
monologues in which 7 dierent speakers
are invited, in an informal setting, to
describe a short scene from a Charlie
Chaplin movie
7 M0002, M0022,
M019, M018,
M021, M023
Professional
Corpus
e Professional corpus consists of
4 speech samples (monologues and
dialogues) in a professional context.
4 M1001, M1003,
D1002, D1003
Broadcast
corpus
e Broadcast corpus consists of 14
broadcasted monologues, dialogues and
conversations downloaded from the
Internet for the Rhapsodie project
14 M2004, D2003,
M2002, M2006,
M2003, D2007,
D2008, D2010,
D2006, M2005,
D2012, D2011,
D2013, D2002
A synopsis of the criteria adopted for collecting and sampling the Rhapsodie cor-
pus is given in Figure1. Table4 presents all the samples of the treebank together
with their number of tokens and their length.
Table4. Rhapsodie samples: length and number of words of each sample
Mono-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration Dia-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration
seconds
M0001 Itinerary:
Place Victor-
Hugo1
138 100 D0001 Paris by bus 1185 330
M0002 Charlot: silent
lm
190 67 D0002 Schools in Paris 1107 291
M0003 Itinerary:
Notre Dame
353 100 D0003 Childhood
memories
470 285
M0004 Itinerary:
cinema star1
45 15 D0004 Bookshops in
Paris
1281 293
M0005 Itinerary:
Albert 1er de
Belgique 1
143 48 D0005 Computer
programmer
995 240
M0006 Itinerary:
Albert 1er de
Belgique 2
112 27 D0006 Medical student 1364 367

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Table4. (continued)
Mono-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration Dia-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration
seconds
M0007 Itinerary:
Saint Jean de
Maurienne1
172 51 D0007 Itinerary: Hubert
Dubedout
143 110
M0008 Itinerary:
Hermillon
55 18 D0008 Itinerary:
cable-car
692 103
M0009 Itinerary:
Saint Jean de
Maurienne2
205 64 D0009 Crapaud
armchair
1343 156
M0010 Itinerary:
cinema star2
61 17 D0017 Itinerary:
crossing
114 47
M0011 Itinerary: ls
de la Sarce
161 53 D0020 Itinerary: rue
Lakanal
106 35
M0012 Itinerary:
boulevard
Gambetta
50 22 D1001 Christian living 1026 434
M0013 Itinerary:
Place Victor-
Hugo2
176 51 D1002 Art: Yves Klein 516 154
M0014 Itinerary:
place Paul
Vallier
79 30 D1003 Studies in
Portugal
560 136
M0015 Itinerary:
avenue Alsace
Lorraine
79 27 D2001 Radio: Françoise
Giroud
1997 206
M0016 Itinerary:
CRDT
244 83 D2002 Radio: Pascal
Ferran, Haruki
Murakami
936 632
M0018 Charlot:
social conict
262 89 D2003 Match France-
Argentina
1398 300
M0019 Charlot:
caterer
194 60 D2004 Flying doctors 1023 314
M0022 Charlot: true
gentleman
228 103 D2005 Radio: Jacques
Attali
1014 306
M0023 Charlot: the
girl
333 88 D2006 Mitterrand at
the National
Assembly
237 170
M0024 Charlot: the
bakery
138 45 D2007 Talk show:
how to pick
somebody up
1055 262
(continued)

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Table4. (continued)
Mono-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration Dia-
logues
Key word Number
of tokens
Duration
seconds
M1001 Clara, 19
years old
386 88 D2008 Radio: inuenza 2119 512
M1003 Angelina, 18
years old
828 247 D2009 Radio: Roland
Barthes
1040 309
M2001 Sarkozy,
speech to the
army
535 217 D2010 Radio:
Marguerite
Duras
1126 319
M2002 Conference
on philoso-
phy
1312 386 D2011 Teleshopping:
magic ball
1067 341
M2003 e mass 723 295 D2012 Radio:
Szymanowski
1004 306
M2004 Chirac, New
Year’s Eve
broadcast to
the French
1263 632 D2013 Press Review 636 182
M2005 Radio:
Facebook
355
M2006 News ash 975
Task
Planning
Interactivity
Channel
Discursive sequence
Monologue
Dialogue
Private
Public
Rhapsodie corpus
External sources
Manual collection: careful
balancing of dierent discourse
genres
→ 32 samples
Internal sources
Missing samples collected
(recorded and tracked on the web)
→ 25 samples
Figure1. Corpus design and data collection for the Rhapsodie Project

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Chapter1. Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank 
. Questions to be answered
is section rst discusses legal and ethical issues, in particular with respect to
intellectual property (Section4.1.) and presents the procedure to acknowledge the
intellectual property of the creators of the source corpora, as well as strategies
to refer to source corpora and to ensure the possibility of retrieving the original
samples. en it describes the tool and the method used to process the metadata
available on the Rhapsodie home page (http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr) for each
sample (Section4.2).
. Legal and ethical issues
Digital formats along with the development of the Internet have greatly facilitated
the dissemination of linguistic resources in the academic and scientic world. e
development of open access projects has however raised some crucial ethical and
legal issues concerning the people recorded and authors’ rights (Baude 2006). e
collection of the Rhapsodie corpus raised three important ethical issues concern-
ing (i) respect of the intellectual property of the creators of source corpora: How
can the right of the scientist to have free access to sources be balanced against
the protection of authorship? How should the scientic enrichment of existing
sources be valued? What deontological measures should be taken when citing a
second-hand sample in a publication? (ii) respect of the privacy of participants.
What measures need to be taken in order to avoid the open publication of re-
cordings causing harm to the recorded speakers? (iii) open access to data. How
can a copyright on data, and at the same time free enrichment of the data, be
guaranteed? In the absence of shared good practices, we adopted specic strategies
to achieve a balance between these three competing priorities.
In order to guarantee respect of intellectual property, we enriched our corpus
with CMDI metadata. e CMDI format allows for a full description of the source
corpora and their related publications.
We also adopted a well-dened citation format for the examples drawn from
the Rhapsodie reservoir and based on external sources: ese sources are cited by
specifying the name of the Rhapsodie sample, preceded by the prex ‘Rhap-’ and
followed by the name of the source corpus, e.g.
(1) j’accorde une puissance énorme à l’acte d’écrire
[Rhap-D2009, corpus Mertens]
(2) c’était ils préféraient rigoler que de travailler [Rhap-D0002, CFPP2000]
(3) je suis heureux de me retrouver ce soir parmi vous [Rhap-M2001, C-Prom]

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(4) et puis nalement bah on a choisi de rester [Rhap-D0003, PFC]
Furthermore, we gave precise instructions for citing the publications related to
source corpora (see column 2, Table2, references in italics).
In order to guarantee the privacy of speakers we mostly selected recordings
for which informed consent had been obtained at the outset and we anonymized
all proper nouns, including toponyms. It should also be noted that the short-
sampling strategy used in the compilation of the corpus limits the amount of
information provided about speakers: As they are not easily identiable, they are
better protected.
In order to freely distribute our treebank and at the same time protect our copy-
right, as well as the copyright of the source corpora, we adopted the Attribution,
No Commercial, Share Alike Common Free License <http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en>.
. Metadata
We chose to encode our metadata in the IMDI-CMDI format developed at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (CMDI, <http://www.clarin.eu/
cmdi>; Broeder et al. 2011, 2012). is format is exible enough to be adapted
to the metadata encoding needs of dierent projects. In Rhapsodie, we did not
need a ne-grained description of speaker sociolinguistic characteristics, nor did
we need to detail the modalities of data collection, since this had been basically
conducted in the framework of the source projects (Section3). Rather we needed
(i) to explicitly mention and describe the source corpora; (ii) to guarantee access
to the source les; (iii) to describe in detail the speech situation; (iv) to provide for
each sample a thorough description of the annotations; and (v) to acknowledge
the intellectual property of the annotators.
Using CMDI we dened the prole of the metadata we needed. Generally
speaking, we chose to provide information on the sample, speakers, discourse situ-
ation, corpus sources, and written and media resources associated to each sample.
e use of these components easily allowed us to meet our needs. In particular,
we used the IMDI “source” component to give a detailed description of the source
corpora. In the “session” component we assigned each sample a unique identier
that allows for rapid retrieval of the source sample and its metadata. With only a
few modications to the IMDI “discourse” component, we were able to provide a
complete description of the situational variables characterizing each sample. In
the “written source” component we both provided detailed information concern-
ing the annotation of each sample and we acknowledged the intellectual property
of annotators.

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Chapter1. Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank 
In order to manipulate the metadata, we used the Arbil tool associated to the
CMDI format <http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/arbil/description/>, which allowed
us to easily edit XML les for our metadata and to convert them into HTML.
A tool available on the project website, <www.projet-rhapsodie.fr>, can be
used to browse the metadata and select samples on the basis of specic character-
istics: e sex of speakers, their age, the type of genre (discourse or religious/ritual
speech), the type of sub-genre (argumentative, descriptive, narrative, oratory, pro-
cedural, or conversational), the task (advertising, lessons, life-stories, etc.), the type
of interactivity between speakers (interactive, non-interactive, semi-interactive),
Figure2. e Rhapsodie metadata browser
Figure3. e description of genres based on the IMDI vocabulary for the discourse
component

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 Anne Lacheret-Dujour et al.
the social context (private or public), the event structure (monologue, dialogue or
conversation), the planning type (planned, semi-spontaneous, spontaneous), and
the source corpus (Figures2 and 3).
. Conclusions
In designing the Rhapsodie corpus we had a clear objective: To collect a sucient
variety of text types to test and improve the exibility of our annotation schemata.
We also had a signicant constraint: We could not rely on a pre-existing represen-
tative corpus of spoken French from which to extract our data.
is limitation forced us to select and extract excerpts from a number of dier-
ent corpora and to collect new data wherever a given text type was not represented.
is bouquet de corpus approach had never been adopted before, at least in France,
which raised a number of challenging new theoretical, ethical, and legal questions.
From a theoretical point of view, we could not count on a unied model of
textual diversity. We decided therefore to presuppose a correlation between the
heterogeneity of speech situations and the variety of text types. We hypothesized
in other words that each particular speech situation engenders a number of
specic linguistic constructions. We collected data along a number of axes of situ-
ational variation: Monologues vs. dialogues, private vs. public speech, interactive
vs. non-interactive speech, face-to-face vs. broadcast samples, more or less formal
registers. As we will see in the following chapters, the comprehensiveness of the
Rhapsodie annotation schemata is precisely due to the variety of texts that have
been annotated.
From an ethical and legal point of view, a number of questions arose due to the
fact that we actually made public use of public resources. is apparently trivial
task led us to dene Good Practice guidelines with respect to the acknowledgment
of the intellectual property of both authors and annotators as well as of the privacy
of speakers. is led us to propose a short sampling strategy so as to optimize
the anonymization, to dene a standard for the citation of second-hand data, and
to choose a exible and detailed format of metadata such as CMDI to guarantee
a ne-grained and complete description of source corpora, annotations, and
speech situations.