On variability in the identification and labelling of disfluencies — preliminary results from 23 annotations of the same data




Trouvain, Jürgen; Crible, Ludivine; Belz, Malte; Betz, Simon; Beňuš, Štefan; Baqué, Lorraine; Cantarutti, Marina; Di Napoli, Jessica; Didirková, Ivana; Machuca, Maria; Mareková, Lucia; Niculescu, Oana; Peltonen, Pauliina; Pistono, Aurelie; Schettino, Loredana; Silber-Varod, Vered; Williams, Simon

Helena Moniz and Fernando Batista

Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech Workshop

2025

 Interspeech

Proc. Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop 2025

57

61

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21437/DiSS.2025-12

https://www.isca-archive.org/tmp/diss_2025/trouvain25_diss.html

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/499212588



This study provides a preliminary report on a large inter-annotator agreement experiment where 23 expert annotators from various research backgrounds identified and labelled disfluencies in the same speech sample. Each annotator was instructed to analyze the sample according to the framework (definitions, segmentation, labels, etc.) they typically use. The annotations were then processed and compared across three different dimensions: 1) the scope of the chosen typology and the definitions within, 2) the implementation of the typology in terms of annotation tiers and labels, and 3) the temporal alignment of the annotations. Preliminary findings reveal that there are substantial variations between annotators on various levels of annotation. The lack of a common standard becomes particularly evident in more complex segments, such as repairs.


Last updated on 13/01/2026 08:03:45 AM