Effective XML Representation for Spoken Language in Organisations

Spoken Language can be used to provide insights into organisational processes, unfortunately transcription and coding stages are very time consuming and expensive. The concept of partial transcription and coding is proposed in which spoken language is indexed prior to any subsequent processing. The functional linguistic theory of texture is used to describe the effects of partial transcription on observational records. The standard used to encode transcript context and metadata is called CHAT, but a previous XML schema developed to implement it contains design assumptions that make it difficult to support partial transcription for example. This paper describes a more effective XML schema that overcomes many of these problems and is intended for use in applications that support the rapid development of spoken language deliverables. 1. Significance of Spoken Language Resources Spoken Language is a central but nonetheless often overlooked organisational resource. Its complexity signals its enormous potential for a variety of organisational applications including but not limited to the analysis of decision-making processes; negotiations occurring during the introduction of new work practices into work places; training and deployment of methods; and systems analysis, design, development, installation, operation and decommissioning. The complexity of spoken language can be studied using a variety of research approaches including various kinds of qualitative analysis, contextual analysis, ethnography, semiotics, and linguistics. As spoken language is used to represent different kinds of meanings than written language, this will necessitate special technologies for its potential to be fully appreciated and used. A major operational difficulty that affects the acceptance and uptake of approaches that utilise spoken language resources to study organisations and their associated technologies is the performance bottleneck associated with the transcription and coding processes. In part this is a consequence of some basic assumptions about what constitutes adequate spoken language data from a research perspective. The belief that transcripts can only be of use when they completely cover the entire observational record and are exhaustive in terms of coding is referred to here as a monolithic view of transcription and its deliverables. As transcripts can be re-analysed or reused for different purposes, the notion that coding in particular can ever be complete is questionable. Furthermore, due consideration must be given to issues of security, privacy, confidentiality and intellectual property related to spoken language in organisational settings. It must also be acknowledged that organisations constitute ‘unsafe environments’ for participants (Cameron et al 1992) involving issues of access, control, power and representation. Therefore, the assumptions that inform a monolithic view of transcription and coding deliverables may need to be revised. In the following section we propose moving from a monolithic to a ‘partial’ view of transcription and coding, and suggest theory and methods that can assist us in understanding the consequences of doing so. 2. Concept of Partial Transcription One obvious strategy for dealing with the bottlenecks and problems associated with transcription and coding processes in organisational settings is to omit chunks of the observational record based on the occurrence of an explicit indexing phase prior to transcription and coding itself. In contrast to a monolithic approach to transcription, previously described, the production of intentionally incomplete transcription and coding deliverables is referred to here as partial transcription. The advantages of partial transcription include amongst other things the ability to encourage empowerment research (see Cameron et al 1992) by enabling the participants themselves to determine what gets recorded. This facilitates trust and improves the research relationship between analysts and members of organisations. An obvious difficulty with partial transcription is that, depending on the kind of analysis being undertaken, omitting sections of a transcript will disrupt a number of spoken language resourcessome of these may be crucial to the analysis being conducted. Fortunately, functional linguistic theories exist which can give considerable insight into which specific language resources will be affected. We use Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) a semiotic model of language (Halliday 1985) because it has a concept referred to as texture that encompasses and defines all the textforming resources that may be used in a transcript or any other text. For example, texture has also been applied to hypertext development and modeling (Clarke 1997). Any texts including all transcripts must possess texture in order to function as a semantic unit, as well as being relevant or appropriate to a given social setting or occasion. Whether knowingly or not, speakers and writers use their experience of texture resources when constructing texts, while listeners and readers use their experience of these resources when interpreting texts. Texts are generally read from start to finish and so many of these resources flow through a text in chains. This is an attribute of language referred to as sequential implicativeness (Schegloff and Sachs 1973). For example a text might start with the sentence “Rod is in the Red Theatre” and if the next sentence was “He is giving a seminar” we might reasonably conclude that the ‘He’ is Rod. This is an effect of sequential implicativeness in the so-called Reference System (see below). There are several models of texture within SFL. The texture model we use (Martins’ 1992, 381 adaptation of Halliday and Hasan’s 1976 model) recognises three major groups of text-forming resourcesIntrasentential Resources, Intersentential Resources, and Coherence. Within each major group, there are a number of sub-categories of textforming resources each having an associated analysis method and some also have graphical methods: intra-sentential resources (Martin 1992, 381) or structural resources (Halliday 1985)involve systems of THEME and INFORMATION and spoken language specific systems involved in Conversation Structure. All texts consist of sets of clauses each of which can be divided into a theme and a rheme. Listeners or readers rely upon thematic progression, the specific pattern of themes, to predict how the text should unfold. Texts must also provide and ‘manage’ information. Listeners or readers come to rely upon patterns of information units to build and accumulate new meanings from those that have already been given. Conversation Structure involves speech functions the characteristic set of moves enacted by participants involving initiations (offers, commands, statements, questions) or responses, as well as sequences of speech functions that form jointly negotiated patterns called exchange structure. intersentential text-forming resources of Cohesiondescribe how clauses within any text are interrelated giving the appearance of a unity thereby assisting listeners and readers in understanding the meanings being negotiated. There are a number of types of cohesion, including lexical cohesion which describes how lexical items (words) and sequences of events are used to consistently relate a text to a topic, reference which describes how participants are introduced and subsequently managed, ellipsis which establishes reference relationships through the omission of otherwise repetitive lexical items, substitution which employs alternate lexis for original lexical items, and conjunction which refers to the logical relations between parts of a text. text forming resources of Coherencewhich describes how clauses in texts relate to the contexts in which they occur. All texts must be relevant to the immediate situational context, referred to as situational coherence, while also conforming to an appropriate genre, referred to as generic coherence. It is relatively easy to understand in principle what happens when we partially transcribe. Effectively we run the risk of disrupting sequential implicativeness of many of these textforming resources. Partial transcripts may loose coherence, and will most certainly have disrupted thematic and informational intra-sentential resources. Perhaps the group of text forming resources most disrupted will be cohesion as omitting clauses make it more difficult for readers to understand the transcript as a unity. We could easily produce an unintelligible partial transcript if we removed too much of it. While texture theory can tell us which language resources will be affected when we adopt partial transcription, it can only provide part of the picture. The theory of texture cannot tell us how significant the disruption will be for the type of research methodology being undertaken. NLP analyses may find partial transcription useful because redundancy within and interdependency between text-forming resources can offset the fact that the transcript is not complete. We might expect qualitative analyses to be adversely affected by partial transcription although this may be almost completely offset by carefully designing the indexing phase. The indexing phase may function to provide Code Tables for those qualitative methodologies that use descriptive, interpretative or pattern codes based on relatively pre-established analytical categories (see Miles and Huberman 1994, 57-72). However, grounded theory and ethnographic methodologies are more likely to be adversely effected by adopting partial transcription. Of course, it is impossible here to consider all the ways in which a text may have its texture forming resources affected by partial transcription, but knowledge of these resources can help us greatly. Having established partial transcription as a potentially useful approach to dealing with the bottlenecks associated with transcription and coding processes in organisation it became a mandatory requirement in our studies. We now turn our attention to ways in which we represent the transcript content and metadata. 3. Representing Talk: CHAT and the TalkBank Schema Even in the research literature, transcription is often ad hoc and idiosyncratic; formal standards are not necessarily well known. One of the best-defined transcription standards is CHATCodes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts developed by Brain MacWhinney and Jane Walter at the CHILDESChild Language Data Exchange Research Centre, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University (CHILDES 2003). CHAT is a scalable, elaborate and expressive standard that supports transcription and coding even under the most adverse of conditions (participants with speech impediments, unclear or noisy recordings, breaks in the observational record). The standard is extensible, providing a consistent way of adding new headers if necessary (MacWhinney 2003). As illustrated in Figure 1, CHAT transcripts have a common basic structure. A block of socalled Constant Headers at the top of the transcript starting with an @Begin provides persistent information, which is applicable throughout the transcript. Some headers can occur more than once in a transcript signalling for example, changes in situation, space and time, and are referred to as Changeable Headers. The body of the transcript consists of speaker utterances called Mainlines, signalled with an asterix and a three-letter participant code. Each mainline may be followed by zero or more Dependent Tiers, used for coding information about the utterances. These start with a percent sign and threeletter code that indicates the type of coding information provided. The single command @End is used to mark the end of the transcript. One of the reasons that CHAT is of interest for researchers of spoken language in organisational settings is that it was developed with subsequent computer processing in mind. A suite of programs called CLAN can be used to parse CHAT compliant transcripts. Development work has proceeded in several directions under the aegis of a National Science Foundation funded joint project between Carnegie Mellon and Pennsylvania Universities called TalkBank. The first direction involves expanding the range of media used in the study of communication. The second direction involves leveraging the advantages afforded by XML and related technologies. Within TalkBank, the spoken language resources are represented using CHAT. The design of the current TalkBank (2003a) schema appears to be based on creating an XML version of the CHAT standard and for the most part appears to reproduce the structure of a CHAT file itself. A design assumption that informs the TalkBank schema is that transcripts are monolithic entities, as previously defined, and this reflects the kind of applications that CHAT was developed to address. As described in section 2, transcription in organisational settings and for organisational purposes necessitates a different design approach, which we believe makes the adoption of the current TalkBank CHAT schema problematic for the following reasons: Figure 1: Structure of a simple CHAT Transcript. The special symbols in the mainlines indicate group structure. The excerpt is from ‘SL6’, SemLab Corpora (after Clarke et al 2003). @Begin @Participants: CAR Caroline Adult, DAL Dali Adult, PHI Phil Adult @Age of CAR: 40; @Sex of CAR: female @SES of CAR: working @Age of DAL: 29; @Sex of DAL: male @SES of DAL: working @Age of PHI: 34; @Sex of PHI: male @SES of PHI: working @Coder: Phil Windridge @Transcriber: Phil Windridge @Date:20-FEB-2003 @Filename: SL6 @Time Duration: 10:00-10:46 @Room Layout: K316; several tables pushed together in the centre of the room leaving little room to squeeze around the outside; whiteboard,OHP and a bookcase full of PhD and Masters dissertations @Situation:Caroline, Dali and Phil conduct an informal technical meeting for SemLab *DAL: yeah that's nice, ok. %act: adjusts the mini disk equipment *CAR: [=! chuckles] okay # right. *DAL: < [//] er actually [//] still trying working on it>[>].