The Spoken Dutch Corpus Project

The Spoken Dutch Corpus Project

Nelleke
Oostdijk
Faculty of Arts Nijmegen University
N.Oostdijk@let.kun.nl

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

As one of the smaller languages in Europe, Dutch is under serious threat of
gradually disappearing as it is losing ground to English. In the European
setting the English language is being used increasingly more widely, not just in
international communication but also in business, economics and other areas of
interest. The availability of the necessary resources has placed the
English-language-based language and speech technology in the leading position it
holds today and has thus further strengthened the position of English in
general. The fact that to date for Dutch the relevant language resources
available are but few forms a serious complication for the advancement of Dutch
language and speech technology. Therefore in June 1998 the Spoken Dutch Corpus
Project was started.This publication was supported by the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number
014-17-510.
The project aims at the compilation and annotation of a 10-million-word corpus of
contemporary standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders. It is
funded jointly by the Flemish and Dutch governments and the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and has a budget of some 4.5 million
EURO. The entire corpus will be orthographically transcribed and annotated with
part-of-speech information. A selection of one million words will be analysed
in-depth, including a phonological, phonetic and prosodic transcription, and
syntactic analysis. The corpus, together with the recordings, will be made
available for scientific research. It will be distributed on CD-ROM by the Dutch
Language Union.