Chapter 1

Collecting data for the Rhapsodie treebank

This chapter is devoted to the development of the Rhapsodie repository. We describe the selection of data to be annotated, the principles used to document the data and discuss the theoretical assumptions underlying the Rhapsodie project. The aim was to provide a corpus to study the interface between discourse, syntax, and prosody in French and the variation of intonosyntactic features according to discourse genre in the marking of informational structure as well as expressivity in unelicited speech. At the beginning of the Rhapsodie project such data were under-represented and the need for spoken corpora of this type in French was strongly felt. Consequently, several challenges had to be addressed. First, we discuss the different obstacles and challenging questions we faced with respect to the development of a well-balanced corpus of different discourse genres produced in different speech situations, such as the nature of the data and the type of information to include in the metadata. Then, we present the sources from which the samples were extracted, legal and ethical issues, and the methodology adopted to encode the metadata.