Non-speech acoustic events

Acoustic events enclosed in square brackets can come from the following set:

Filled_Pause

Note that the filled pauses represent acoustic events similar acoustically and phonetically to speech. If used, transcriptions of hesitation sounds should be taken from an agreed list and put in the documentation file (e.g. [uh], [um], [er], [ah], [mm])

Speaker_other

meaning all types of noises made by the speaker him or herself, like grunt, throat_clear, tongue_click, lip_smack, mouth_noise, loud_breath, laugh, cough, loud_sigh.

Note: Acoustic events such as inhalation, exhalation, tongue clicks, lip smacks, and breath noise will not be transcribed if they are low level and non-intrusive.

Nonspeaker_other

meaning all types of noises not made by the speaker himself, like phone ringing, paper_rustle, door_slam, other_voices, TV-radio, crosstalk.

Note: These will not be transcribed if they are low level and non-intrusive.

As these are currently in English partners are free to provide the language equivalents of these phrases. They should use only alphabetic characters and underscore, no spaces.

These events must be marked in the correct location in a transcribed utterance. It is often difficult to localise these events; transcribing the utterance first, and listening for these events in a second pass is the correct procedure.

For noise events that occur over a span of one or more words, the transcriber should indicate the beginning of the noise, before the word it affects:

Ex.:``show the [nonspeaker_other] flights to Boston

Note: If a need is discovered to notate specific events these can be added, provided that they are defined clearly in the documentation and followed consistently. They should be capable of being remapped later.

Note: There is no notation for spans of noise events as in the ATIS conventions.