Swiss Mediation Corpus

The Swiss Mediation Corpus has been collected and curated at USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics (IALS), between 2017 and 2023. It is a corpus of transcribed role-played mediation sessions, mediated by certified professionals in Switzerland, in Italian and French. The corpus is composed by twelve cases, collected in Switzerland within two different research projects in the area of argumentation studies and linguistics. As it is detailed in the publications related to this dataset, role-played mediation sessions are a significant part of mediators' training and have been considered an excellent source for the study of discourse in mediation, given the high level of confidentiality that is required in actual mediation cases. Nine of the twelve cases that constitute the Swiss Mediation Corpus have been collected within the project RefraMe - “The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediators’ argumentation”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Contract no. 10001C_17004/1, 2017-2021). Applicant: Sara Greco, collaborator: Chiara Jermini – Martinez Soria). This project had the aim of explaining mediator's reframing oriented towards conflict resolution in terms of argumentative inference. The remaining three cases have been collected within the project "Quelle place pour les émotions des parties dans le discours en médiation des conflits?", funded by the Empiris foundation through the Jakob Wüest fund (2022-2023). Applicant and investigator: Chiara Jermini-Martinez Soria. The aim was to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which professional mediators communicate about conflicting parties’ emotions during mediation sessions, analyzing the reasons and the implications (for conflict resolution) of mediators’ discursive choices in this regard. Transcription of spoken data has been curated for the purposes of research in argumentation studies and linguistics. Related publications offer more details regarding transcription conventions, which have been adapted from standard methods of transcription in Conversation Analysis. The enclosed file proposes an overview of the cases of the Swiss Mediation Corpus, including type of conflict, date of recording, lenght, and spoken language. For ethical reasons (data collection has been approved by the Ethics Commitee at USI Università della Svizzera italiana), transcriptions are not made public on Zenodo. However, it is possible for individual researchers to ask for transcriptions to be used exclusively for research purposes; please write to the contact person in case you are interested; always refer to the DOI of the Swiss Mediation corpus and related publications.