Spoken English Corpus

[2] SEC comprises 53 recorded passages, mainly from the BBC, spoken in the accent usually referred to as Received Pronunciation, or RP.

Two transcribers, Gerry Knowles and Briony Williams, both supported by Lita Taylor, analysed the entire corpus.

The whole transcription in print was made in its present form by Peter Alderson, who later took over as Speech Research Manager at IBM.

A collaboration, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in 1992–4, between speech scientists at the Universities of Lancaster and Leeds in the United Kingdom set out to produce a version of the corpus which contained the recordings in digital form, time-linked to the text.

[13] The principal researchers were Gerry Knowles and Tamas Varadi (Lancaster) and Peter Roach and Simon Arnfield (Leeds).

[16] The work on MARSEC in Lancaster and Leeds finished around 1995, but the corpus has subsequently been the object of a considerable amount of further development at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France, under the direction of Daniel Hirst.

Two supplementary levels, the grammatical annotation by CLAWS and a Property Grammar system developed at Aix-en-Provence, are to be integrated soon.