An Automatic Prosody Tagger for Spontaneous Speech

Mónica Domínguez, Mireia Farrús, Leo Wanner


Abstract
Speech prosody is known to be central in advanced communication technologies. However, despite the advances of theoretical studies in speech prosody, so far, no large scale prosody annotated resources that would facilitate empirical research and the development of empirical computational approaches are available. This is to a large extent due to the fact that current common prosody annotation conventions offer a descriptive framework of intonation contours and phrasing based on labels. This makes it difficult to reach a satisfactory inter-annotator agreement during the annotation of gold standard annotations and, subsequently, to create consistent large scale annotations. To address this problem, we present an annotation schema for prominence and boundary labeling of prosodic phrases based upon acoustic parameters and a tagger for prosody annotation at the prosodic phrase level. Evaluation proves that inter-annotator agreement reaches satisfactory values, from 0.60 to 0.80 Cohen’s kappa, while the prosody tagger achieves acceptable recall and f-measure figures for five spontaneous samples used in the evaluation of monologue and dialogue formats in English and Spanish. The work presented in this paper is a first step towards a semi-automatic acquisition of large corpora for empirical prosodic analysis.
Anthology ID:
C16-1037
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
377–386
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1037
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mónica Domínguez, Mireia Farrús, and Leo Wanner. 2016. An Automatic Prosody Tagger for Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 377–386, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
An Automatic Prosody Tagger for Spontaneous Speech (Domínguez et al., COLING 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1037.pdf
Code
 monikaUPF/modularProsodyTagger