User, who art thou? User Profiling for Oral Corpus Platforms

User, who art thou? User Profiling for Oral Corpus Platforms Christian Fandrych***, Elena Frick**, Hanna Hedeland*, Anna Iliash***, Daniel Jettka*, Cordula Meißner***, Thomas Schmidt**, Franziska Wallner***, Kathrin Weigert***, Swantje Westpfahl** *Hamburger Zentrum für Sprachkorpora, Max Brauer-Allee 60, D-22767 Hamburg **Institut für Deutsche Sprache, R5 6–13, D-68161 Mannheim, ***Herder-Institut, Universität Leipzig, Beethovenstraße 15, D-04107 Leipzig E-mail: {thomas.schmidt|frick|westpfahl}@ids-mannheim.de, {hanna.hedeland|daniel.jettka}@uni-hamburg.de, {fandrych|f.wallner}@rz.uni-leipzig.de, cordula.meissner@uni-leipzig.de, kw59kahe@studserv.uni-leipzig.de, annailiash.fm@gmail.com Abstract This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts. Keywords: oral corpus platform, user survey 1. Introduction The release of several larger resources alongside platforms for their dissemination - such as CLAPI (Bert et al. 2010) and ESLO (Baude/Dugua, 2011) for French, the ORAL series in the Czech National Corpus (Kren, 2015) or GOS, the corpus of spoken Slovene (Verdonik et al., 2013), to name just a few - has considerably broadened the potential user base of oral (“speech”) corpora during the last ten years. Nowadays, the use of such data is no longer restricted to speech technology experts but also includes researchers, teachers and students from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. For these new types of users, web-based corpus platforms offering easy browsing and querying access to the audio/video files, their transcriptions and metadata, are usually the principal means of interacting with the data. Little attention has been paid so far to questions such as who uses such platforms for what kind of purposes and in which ways. Existing studies that we have come across, such as Anthony (2013), Soehn/Zinsmeister (2008) or Santos/Frankenberg-Garcia (2007) all deal with written corpora. Goldmann et al. (2005: 296) have, however, pointed out that there may be an even greater need for user profiling and user studies in the case of oral corpora: „[We know] far less about how best to support access to extended sessions of spontaneous speech. There is also a need for focussed assessment of the needs of specific user groups that to date have been understudied.” The present contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD, Schmidt, 2014a), the GeWiss corpus (Slavcheva & Meißner, 2014) and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK, Hedeland et al., 2014) were asked to participate in 1 http://dgd.ids-mannheim.de a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with …

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