Towards low-resource prosodic boundary detection

In this study we propose a method of prosodic boundary detection based only on acoustic cues which are easily extractable from the speech signal and without any supervision. Drawing a parallel between the process of language acquisition in babies and the speech processing techniques for under-resourced languages, we take advantage of the findings of several psycholinguistic studies relative to the cues used by babies for the identification of prosodic boundaries. Several durational and pitch cues were investigated, by themselves or in a combination, and relatively good performances were achieved. The best result obtained, a combination of all the cues, compares well against a previously proposed approach, without relying on any learning method or any lexical or syntactic cues. Index Terms Prosodic boundaries, acoustic cues, prosody recognition