GREEK ToBI: A System for the Annotation of Greek Speech Corpora

Greek ToBI is a system for the annotation of (Standard) Greek spoken corpora, that encodes intonational, prosodic and phonetic information. It is used to develop a large and publicly available database of prosodically annotated utterances for research, engineering and educational purposes. Greek ToBI is based on the system developed for American English (ToBI), but includes novel features (“tiers”) designed to address particularities of Greek prosody that merit annotation, such as stress and juncture. Thus Greek ToBI includes five tiers: the Tone Tier shows the intonational analysis of the utterance; the Prosodic Words Tier is a phonetic transcription; the Break Index Tier shows indices of cohesion; the Words Tier gives the text in romanization; the Miscellaneous Tier is used to encode other relevant information (e.g., disfluency or pitch-halving). The development of GRToBI is largely based on the transcription and analysis of a corpus of spoken Greek, that includes data from several speakers and speech styles, but also draws on existing quantitative research on Greek prosody.