Towards Multimodal Spoken Language Corpora: TransTool and SyncTool

This paper argues for the usefulness of multimodal spoken language corpora and specifies components of a platform for the creation, maintenance and exploitation of such corpora. Two of the components, which have already been implemented as prototypes, are described in more detail: TransTool and SyncTool. TransTool is a transcription editor meant to facilitate and partially automate the task of a human transcriber, while SyncTool is a tool for aligning the resulting transcriptions with a digitized audio and video recording in order to allow synchronized presentation of different representations (e.g., text, audio, video, acoustic analysis). Finally, a brief comparison is made between these tools and other programs developed for similar purposes.