ITR-SCOTUS: A Resource for Collaborative Research in Speech Technology, Linguistics, Decision Processes and the Law

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will create a digital audio archive that will enable scientists in several fields to approach novel research issues in speech and language studies, issues in group decision-making, and issues at the leading edge of human communication scholarship. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has been recording its public proceedings since 3 October 1955. These recordings - now in the National Archives - span nearly five decades and consist principally of oral arguments in which justices and attorneys engage in various forms of persuasion and communication between bench and bar and, obliquely, among the justices themselves. The arguments have been transcribed professionally across the entire period, creating a matchless collection of audio materials coupled with highly accurate transcripts. The audio - along with other activities captured on audio such as the announcement of opinions - offers a unique opportunity for researchers across a wide spectrum of disciplines to engage in novel and transforming research projects that were once thought beyond the reach of investigators. The chief result of this work will be a complete and continuing archive of more than six thousand hours of SCOTUS audio. It will provide synchronized (i.e., time-coded) transcripts of the collection, identify and tag individual speakers, build new mark-up tools for these new domains, and share the corpus with researchers and faculty. The result of this interaction among political scientists, legal scholars, linguists, and computer scientists will yield: new knowledge in the modeling of multi-party discussions with complex goals, novel strategies in small group decision process analysis, and path-breaking approaches to extended collaborative commentary addressing the dynamics of human communication. The SCOTUS archive will be maintained as a shared public resource to enhance study and understanding of the Supreme Court of the United States. It will be available to anyone with World Wide Web access. Based on past experience, principal audiences include: researchers across diverse domains, teachers and students, lawyers and litigants, and the visually- and hearing-impaired. Today, more than a million unique users access selected SCOTUS materials each month. With a complete and updated SCOTUS archive and improved ability to query and search, the number of users should expand substantially. By exploiting common interest and beneficial interactions among diverse research communities, this project will create a vast collection of digital objects. Working with partners experienced in data-sharing, the effort aims at revolutionizing the ability to collaborate with physically distributed teams of researchers and their students.