Disfluency and Laughter Annotation in a Light-weight Dialogue Mark-up Protocol

Despite a great deal of research effort, disfluency and laughter annotation is still an unsolved problem, both in terms of consensus for a general applicable system, and in terms of annotation agreement metrics. In this paper we present a new annotation scheme within a light-weight mark-up for spontaneous speech. We show, despite the low overhead required for understanding the annotation protocol, it allows for good inter-annotator agreement and can be used to map onto existing disfluency categorization, with no loss of information.