title: The Hebrew CHILDES corpus: transcription and morphological analysis.
abstract: We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that reflects spoken interactions between children and adults. The corpus is an integral part of the CHILDES database, which distributes similar corpora for over 25 languages. We introduce a dedicated transcription scheme for the spoken Hebrew data that is sensitive to both the phonology and the standard orthography of the language. We also introduce a morphological analyzer that was specifically developed for this corpus. The analyzer adequately covers the entire corpus, producing detailed correct analyses for all tokens. Evaluation on a new corpus reveals high coverage as well. Finally, we describe a morphological disambiguation module that selects the correct analysis of each token in context. The result is a high-quality morphologically-annotated CHILDES corpus of Hebrew, along with a set of tools that can be applied to new corpora.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Aviad
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Albert
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: MacWhinney
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: Bracha
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nir
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: Shuly
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wintner
keywords: CHILDES; Hebrew; Morphological analysis; Morphological disambiguation; Transcription of spoken language