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Convert from Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Transcript format (.trn) to Praat TextGrid

The Santa Barbarba Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE, or, hereafter, SBC) is a multipart published corpus from the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at the University of Pennsylvia. In order to analyze the recordings of the SBC - and their transcripts - in Praat, Aaron Wise (at Duke University) built a Perl script that converts from the SBC's transcript file-format to Praat's TextGrid format. Once converted, the SBC's transcripts can be opened and used seemlessly in Praat. Aaron has given me permission to share this tool with the greater linguistics community. We hope you find it useful.

Information about the SBC is available on a number of websites:

UC Santa Barbara's webpage on the SBC.
Ordering & catalogue information from the LDC: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
The SBC's transcription conventions.
A bibliography of publications using the SBC is available from the University of Bonn.

Download the perl script: sbc_to_tg.pl.

The script (and web tool) should be considered "in beta" and come with no warranty, etcet. However, please let me know if you encounter problems or have suggestions for improvement. The script has not been tested on transcripts from Part 1 of the SBC, only Parts 2-4.

References:

Du Bois, John W., Chafe, Wallace L., Meyer, Charles, and Thompson, Sandra A. 2000. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Part 1. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ISBN 1-58563-164-7.

Du Bois, John W., Chafe, Wallace L., Meyer, Charles, Thompson, Sandra A., and Martey, Nii. 2003. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Part 2. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ISBN 1-58563-272-4.

Du Bois, John W., and Englebretson, Robert. 2004. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Part 3. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ISBN 1-58563-308-9.

Du Bois, John W., and Englebretson, Robert. 2005. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Part 4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ISBN 1-58563-348-8.