For training our classifiers, we decided to extract weak labels using a simple rule based on quotation, implying everything written between quotation marks is direct speech. To yield high accuracy for this approach, it is necessary to use a well-edited collection of texts. Our PD corpus contains such a subset, which we refer to as our <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Kerncorpus</hi>. This <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Kerncorpus</hi> consists of 250 high and middle brow texts (those from the TextGrid digital library), has been manually edited and is assumed to have a mostly consistent use of quotation.