Transcriber effects in the Icelandic parliament corpus

Abstract

The Icelandic parliament corpus is being used to study individual lifespan change in sociolinguistic style-shift. We report on how the word order effect in question is affected by decisions made by those who transcribe the speeches and show that while some changes are made by the transcribers, the overall pattern of linguistic usage is not substantially altered. Ideally, each recording is manually checked by an annotator, but automatic annotation can be used with the understanding that quantitative findings are subject to minor errors.