The Partitur Format at BAS

Most spoken language resources are produced and disseminated together with symbolic information relating to the speech signal. These are for instance orthographic transcript labeling and segmentation on the phonologic phoneti prosodic phrasal level. Most of the known formats for these symbolic data are defined in a ‘closed form’ that is not fexible enough to allow simple and platform independent processing and easy extensions. At the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) a new format has been developed and used over the last few years that shows some significant advantages over other existing formats. This paper describes the basic principles behind this format discusses briefly the advantages and gives detailed definitions of the description levels used so far