Development and Testing of Transcription Software for a Southern Min Spoken Corpus

The usual challenges of transcribing spoken language are compounded for Southern Min (Taiwanese) because it lacks a generally accepted orthography. This study reports the development and testing of software tools for assisting such transcription. Three tools are compared, each representing a different type of interface with our corpus-based Southern Min lexicon (Tsay, 2007): our original Chinese character-based tool (Segmentor), the first version of a romanization-based lexicon entry tool called Adult-Corpus Romanization Input Program (ACRIP 1.0), and a revised version of ACRIP that accepts both character and romanization inputs and integrates them with sound files (ACRIP 2.0). In two experiments, naive native speakers of Southern Min were asked to transcribe passages from our corpus of adult spoken Southern Min (Tsay and Myers, in progress), using one or more of these tools. Experiment 1 showed no disadvantage for romanization-based compared with character-based transcription even for untrained transcribers. Experiment 2 showed significant advantages of the new mixed-system tool (ACRIP 2.0) over both Segmentor and ACRIP 1.0, in both speed and accuracy of transcription. Experiment 2 also showed that only minimal additional training brought dramatic improvements in both speed and accuracy. These results suggest that the transcription of non-Mandarin Sinitic languages benefits from flexible, integrated software tools.