SLaeNDa: An Annotated Corpus of Narrative and Dialogue in Swedish Literary Fiction

摘要

We describe a new corpus, SLaNDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue. It contains Swedish literary fiction, which has been manually annotated for cited materials, with a focus on dialogue. The annotation covers excerpts from eight Swedish novels written between 1879-1940, a period of modernization of the Swedish language. SLaNDa contains annotations for all cited materials that are separate from the main narrative, like quotations and signs. The main focus is on dialogue, for which we annotate speech segments, speech tags, and speakers. In this paper we describe the annotation protocol and procedure and show that we can reach a high inter-annotator agreement. In total, SLaNDa contains annotations of 44 chapters with over 220K tokens. The annotation identified 4,733 instances of cited material and 1,143 named speaker-speech mappings. The corpus is useful for developing computational tools for different types of analysis of literary narrative and speech. We perform a small pilot study where we show how our annotation can help in analyzing language change in Swedish. We find that a number of common function words have their modern version appear earlier in speech than in narrative.