Multi-level Annotation of Speech: An Overview of The Emu Speech Database Management System

Researchers in various fields, from acoustic phonetics to child language development, rely on digitised collections of spoken language data as raw material for research. Access to this data has, in the past, been provided in an ad-hoc manner with labelling standards and software tools developed to serve only one or two projects. A few attempts have been made at providing generalised access to speech corpora but none of these has gained widespread popularity. The Emu system, described here, is a general purpose speech database management system which supports complex multi-level annotations. Emu can read a number of popular label and data file formats and supports overlaying additional annotation with inter-token relations on existing time-aligned label files. Emu provides a graphical labelling tool which can be extended to provide special purpose displays. The software is easily extended via the Tcl/Tk scripting language which can be used, for example, to manipulate annotations and build graphical tools for database creation. This paper discusses the design of the Emu system, giving a detailed description of the annotation structures that it supports. It is argued that these structures are sufficiently general to potentially allow Emu to read any time-aligned linguistic annotation.