---
title: "CoANZSE Audio — paper by Coats (2024) — summary and ideas"
description: "Freely available, searchable English corpora that pair transcripts with recordings are scarce. 33 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Steven Coats"]
year: 2024
venue: "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.302/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/coats-2024-coanzse-audio-creation-online-corpus/"
---
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# CoANZSE Audio: Creation of an Online Corpus for Linguistic and Phonetic Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Englishes

**Authors:** [Steven Coats](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/steven-coats/) · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/) ([LREC 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/2024/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.302/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.302.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7131788990)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/coats-2024-coanzse-audio-creation-online-corpus/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Freely available, searchable English corpora that pair transcripts with recordings are scarce. Most audio collections for Australian and New Zealand English are small, offline, or sold under expensive licences. Coats addresses this gap by extending CoANZSE, a 195-million-word set of geolocated YouTube transcripts from local-government channels, into an online resource that also serves the matching audio and word- and phone-level alignments.

The ASR transcripts were tagged and lemmatized with SpaCy. Each transcript was split into short chunks, and the corresponding audio segments were downloaded and converted to FLAC. The chunks were then force-aligned with the Montreal Forced Aligner, producing Praat TextGrids.

Everything is exposed through a customized BlackLab search interface. Users can run queries over words, lemmas, POS tags and location metadata, and they can download clips, alignments and concordances. The result is more than 20,000 hours of naturalistic, regionally anchored speech, free of charge. The paper illustrates possible uses with two analyses: rare double modals and raising of the /ɛ/ vowel in New Zealand English. The resource supports grammatical, lexical and acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in one place.

## Key points
- **Source and annotation.** Transcripts were collected with yt-dlp from local-government YouTube channels, identified through official government lists. POS tags come from SpaCy en_core_web_sm.
- **Audio retrieval.** Audio was fetched in 20-word chunks, using the timestamps of each chunk's first and last word. Files were converted from .m4a to FLAC with ffmpeg.
- **Alignment.** Alignment used Montreal Forced Aligner 2.0 with the english_us_arpa v2.0.0a acoustic model, which was trained on LibriSpeech data. Output is in ARPAbet based on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
- **Coverage.** The Australian part has 5,196,460 FLAC files and 4,993,881 TextGrid files. Gaps come from videos that were deleted or made private, and from alignments that failed on noisy transcripts or poor audio. New Zealand alignment was still in progress in late 2023.
- **Search platform.** Search runs on BlackLab (Apache Lucene) with Corpus Query Language, hosted at Finland's CSC. Users can filter by country, state, council, channel, date and other metadata, and export results as CSV.

## Interesting ideas
- Long, unpunctuated ASR transcripts are cut into fixed-size word windows anchored on token timestamps, so a heavy downstream tool only ever sees short, bounded pieces. This is a simple way to make expensive processing tractable on huge noisy inputs.
- A pipeline step that fails to produce usable output (no valid TextGrid) is treated as evidence of a bad transcript or poor audio, and that layer is simply withheld rather than published. This keeps the released annotation trustworthy at the cost of coverage.
- Every token is tied to fine-grained location metadata, which lets frequency differences surface directly. One example is "eastern states", which is used mainly in Western Australia and partly in South Australia to mean the country's eastern states.
- Structured queries over word, lemma and POS layers make it possible to hunt for rare syntactic features such as double modals in a very large corpus.
- Public-sector recordings are used as a legally reusable source of naturalistic, unscripted speech, in line with FAIR principles and open-data policies.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): Unpunctuated transcript-like input could be segmented into bounded windows before tagging, avoiding run-on "sentences" that degrade the tagger and lemmatizer.
- **I2** (learn): Silver data could be admitted only when every stage of the pipeline succeeds cleanly, with stage failures used as an automatic noise filter.
- **I3** (world): Region-relative expressions could be resolved against the speaker's location stored in the text world, so the same phrase maps to different entities depending on where it was said.
- **I4** (tree): A similar query layer over UD treebanks and parsed silver data could mine rare constructions like stacked modals, both to check how the parsers attach them and to build targeted test sets.
- **I5** (learn): Open government transcripts could serve as a held-out, spoken-register evaluation set for stress-testing the parsers on disfluent, unpunctuated English.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Steven Coats. 2024. CoANZSE Audio: Creation of an Online Corpus for Linguistic and Phonetic Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Englishes. Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{coats2024coanzse,
  title = {{CoANZSE Audio: Creation of an Online Corpus for Linguistic and Phonetic Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Englishes}},
  author = {Steven Coats},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.63317/2s4aeydp62t2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2s4aeydp62t2}
}
```

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## References

33 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*