From the beginning of the project, the German and the French teams worked closely together, meeting and exchanging frequently during videoconferences, regular thematic workshops and annual symposia to define together:
- A pilot corpus: we chose together comparable interactional settings in German and French data to make comparison easier
- A set of common critical cases: we identified a shared set of critical segmentation cases in German and French with several examples (cf. deliverables)
- The conditions and requirements of tasks automatisation: we discussed together the possibility of automatic and semi-automatic segmentation of interactional corpora
- The level of expertise of the annotators: we discussed how to chose the annotators (number, level of expertise, etc.) in order to use the guidelines and allow us to improve them
- The needed exploratory work on segmentation in interaction concerning the units to chose, first comparative analyses, the necessity of publishing a scientific article (position paper) on these questions, the annotation guidelines
- The conditions for a contrastive study of German and French:
- Divergence in macrosyntactic units: we analysed our common set of critical segmentation cases and found different solutions of segmentation for German and French based on different sets of categories (cf. Deliverables)
- Convergence in interactional units: the same methodology was applied for German and French where the annotations were similar with a common set of categories (cf. Deliverables)
- The use of a common annotation tool EXMaRALDA developped by Thomas Schmidt