The Corpus of British Isles Spoken English (CoBISE) is a corpus of geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) YouTube transcripts from the United Kingdom and Ireland, created for the study of linguistic and interactional phenomena in contemporary English. Transcripts are linked to videos accessible through the YouTube platform, allowing the study of multimodal phenomena.


The corpus was created from 38,680 ASR transcripts from 497 YouTube channels, corresponding to more than 12,800 hours of video. The size of the corpus is 111,563,614 tokens. The channels sampled in the corpus are associated with local government entities such as county or city councils. The transcripts are primarily of recordings of public meetings, although other genres are also present. Video transcripts have been assigned exact latitude-longitude coordinates using a geocoding script.

Format and metadata

The corpus exists in two versions: one in which the transcripts have not been annotated, and one in which word tokens have been annotated with part-of-speech tags and timing. Data is in tabular form in csv format (with the pipe character "|" as a separator). The columns of the table are 'country', 'channel_title', 'channel_id', 'video_title', 'video_id', 'video_length','location','nr_words', 'text_pos', (or 'text', in the untagged version), and 'latlong'. Each row corresponds to an individual transcript (see excerpt below).

Transcripts are in the 'text' column (or 'text_pos', for the tagged version). Tagging was done with spaCy and the Penn Treebank tagset. Tagged tokens have the format "token_POS_10.0", where "token" is the transcribed lexical item, "POS" the tag, and "10.0" the time offset in seconds from the start of the corresponding video.

country channel_title channel_id video_title video_id video_length location nr_words text_pos latlong
0 England Adur and Worthing Councils UCzO8eEeKaOb90S3_XbOp2Xg Hamstring Curl - Get Active L_MeAKFAdfM 198.39 Business Park, 9 Commerce Way, Lancing BN15 8TA, UK 325 the_DT_0.149 next_JJ_0.45 exercise_NN_0.75 is_VBZ_1.079... (50.823891, -0.3376343)
1 England Adur and Worthing Councils UCzO8eEeKaOb90S3_XbOp2Xg #HousingDay 2015 live debate T5upcg1ObuI 1848.21 Business Park, 9 Commerce Way, Lancing BN15 8TA, UK 5175 we_PRP_0.38 've_VBP_0.38 been_VBN_1.38 talking_VBG_1.62... (50.823891, -0.3376343)
2 England Adur and Worthing Councils UCzO8eEeKaOb90S3_XbOp2Xg Front Raise - Get Active HZ8nLNRXGOI 248.48 Business Park, 9 Commerce Way, Lancing BN15 8TA, UK 469 the_DT_0.149 next_JJ_0.359 exercise_NN_0.659 is_VBZ_0.93 ... (50.823891, -0.3376343)
3 England Adur and Worthing Councils UCzO8eEeKaOb90S3_XbOp2Xg #OurDay _ Adur & Worthing Councils kIMvQJnjeTg 163.069 Business Park, 9 Commerce Way, Lancing BN15 8TA, UK 274 [Music]_XX_0.16 why_WRB_6.02 stop_VB_7.02 r6_NN_7.35 ... (50.823891, -0.3376343)
4 England Adur and Worthing Councils UCzO8eEeKaOb90S3_XbOp2Xg Cat Stretch - Get Active cEz-w2z1ZBQ 243.78 Business Park, 9 Commerce Way, Lancing BN15 8TA, UK 471 the_DT_0.149 next_JJ_0.39 stretch_NN_0.81 is_VBZ_1.05 ... (50.823891, -0.3376343)

Locations

Channels have been sampled in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. The map below shows the locations, names, and sizes of the sampled channels.

Sample script

Corpus hits can be presented as a data table with links to the videos at the time of utterance. This Python script, for example, will retrieve all instances of the sequence "I daresay" in the PoS-tagged text in the table cobise_df:


import re
hits = []
pat1 = re.compile("((\\w+_\\S+_\\S+\\s){3}i_\\w+_\\S+ daresay_\\w+_\\S+\\s(\\w+_\\S+_\\S+\\s){3})",re.IGNORECASE)
for i,x in cobise_df.iterrows():   
	if pat1.search(x["text_pos"]):
		finds1 = pat1.findall(x["text_pos"])[0]
		seq = " ".join([x.split("_")[0] for x in finds1[0].split()])
		time = finds1[0].split()[0].split("_")[-1] 
		hits.append((x["country"],x["channel_title"],seq,"https://youtu.be/"+x["video_id"]+"?t="+str(round(float(time)-3))))
pd.DataFrame(hits)
       (...)

Access

The corpus is available free of charge for the purposes of research, education, and scholarship. Users may not redistribute the corpus or use it for commercial purposes. Users are individually responsible for compliance with these terms.

CoBISE can be downloaded from the Harvard Dataverse here.

Citation

To cite the corpus, please use

You may also be interested in the Corpus of North American Spoken English, the Corpus of Australian and New Zealand English, and the Corpus of German Speech.