Towards the next generation of speech tools and corpora

摘要

This special edition picks up the theme 16 years after Bird and Harrington (2001) of current developments in software tools for processing speech and language data. The main objective now is much as it was then: to design and make freely available tools that are independent of the research task and computing environment for creating, annotating, querying, and analysing data from extensive speech and language corpora that often originate from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in the speech sciences. Since then, the advances in web-technology combined with greater processing power and data storage have resulted in what Schiel and Kisler (2017) refer to as a paradigm shift in developing software tools for speech and language corpora (see also predictions already made in this direction by Draxler (1997) through the development of his WWWTranscribe tool).