SibLing Corpus of Russian Dialogue Speech Designed for Research on Speech Entrainment

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6556–6561 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6556 SibLing Corpus of Russian Dialogue Speech Designed for Research on Speech Entrainment Tatiana Kachkovskaia, Tatiana Chukaeva, Vera Evdokimova, Pavel Kholiavin, Daniil Kocharov, Natalia Kriakina, Anna Mamushina, Alla Menshikova, Svetlana Zimina Saint Petersburg State University Saint Petersburg, Russia kachkovskaia@phonetics.pu.ru, chukaeva68@gmail.com, postmaster@phonetics.pu.ru, p.kholyavin@mail.ru, kocharov@phonetics.pu.ru, natalyakryakina@gmail.com, mamushina.anna@mail.ru, menshikova.alla2016@yandex.ru, svetlanazimina6306@gmail.com Abstract The paper presents a new corpus of dialogue speech designed specifically for research in the field of speech entrainment. Given that the degree of accommodation may depend on a number of social factors, the corpus is designed to encompass 5 types of relations between the interlocutors: those between siblings, close friends, strangers of the same gender, strangers of the other gender, strangers of which one has a higher job position and greater age. Another critical decision taken in this corpus is that in all these social settings one speaker is kept the same. This allows us to trace the changes in his/her speech depending on the interlocutor. The basic set of speakers consists of 10 pairs of same–gender siblings (including 4 pairs of identical twins) aged 23–40, and each of them was recorded in the 5 settings mentioned above. In total we obtained 90 dialogues of 25–60 minutes each. The speakers played a card game and a map game; they were recorded in a soundproof studio without being able to see each other due to a non-transparent screen between them. The corpus contains orthographic, phonetic and prosodic annotation and is segmented into turns and inter-pausal units. Keywords: speech corpus, speech entrainment, phonetics, dialogue, siblings, twins 1. Introduction In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in speech entrainment research. The studies on the topic con- tribute to understanding of the processes at work in human– human communication and offer perspectives for the im- itation of these processes in human–computer interaction. However, the problem of speech material for investigations in this field is still present. The corpora recorded specifically for studies on en- trainment include those for national varieties of En- glish (Pardo, 2006) (Branigan et al., 2000) (Levitan et al., 2016) (Nenkova et al., 2008), German (Schweitzer and Lewandowski, 2013), French (Bailly and Lelong, 2010), Italian (Savino et al., 2016), Japanese (Kawahara et al., 2015) and other languages; Russian, however, is not one of these. In the studies on entrainment, one of the most popular ways of arranging a conversation between participants is a task- oriented dialogue in a game form. The tasks are some- times restricted in terms of spontaneity (Bailly and Lelong, 2010), but in most cases they encourage free communi- cation (De Looze et al., 2014). The types of games in- clude map tasks (Pardo, 2006), ranking objects important for survival in a dangerous situation (Kousidis et al., 2009), card matching (Szekely et al., 2015), matching Tangram figures (Savino et al., 2016). This form of interaction re- quires engagement and cooperation …

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