This paper investigates the usefulness of sentence-internal prosodic cues in syntactic parsing of transcribed speech. Intuitively, prosodic cues would seem to provide much the same information in speech as punctuation does in text, so we tried to incorporate them into our parser in much the same way as punctuation is. We compared the accuracy of a statistical parser on the LDC Switchboard treeb...

Previous studies have shown that visual only perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French is possible. The aim of this study was to determine whether the visual modality could be combined to the auditory one and lead to a perceptual enhancement of prosodic focus. In order to examine this question, we carried out auditory only, audiovisual and visual only perception tests. In order to avoi...

Our previous work shows strong prosodic characteristics are present in tonal and pitch accent languages leading to better performance in detecting these languages. This study uses an entropy-based approach to analyze prosodic features for effective modeling. 17 tonal or pitch accent languages, including a number of under-resourced languages in Africa, are studied. Prosodic trigrams are rated as...

Automatic Detection and Classification of Prosodic Events Andrew Rosenberg Prosody, or intonation, is a critically important component of spoken communication. The automatic extraction of prosodic information is necessary for machines to process speech with human levels of proficiency. In this thesis we describe work on the automatic detection and classification of prosodic events – specificall...

This paper investigates how prosodic elements such as prominences and prosodic boundaries in Hindi are perceived. We approach this using data from three sources: (i) native speakers of Hindi without any linguistic expertise (ii) a linguistically trained expert in Hindi prosody and finally, (iii) classifiers trained on English for automatic prominence and boundary detection. We use speech from a...

This paper describes techniques of scoring prosodic proficiency of English sentences spoken by Japanese. The multiple regression model predicts the prosodic proficiency using new prosodic measures based on the characteristics of Japanese novice learners of English. Prosodic measures are calculated by comparing prosodic parameters, such as F0, power and duration, of learner’s and native speaker’...

As a high-level feature, prosody may be an effective feature when it is modeled over longer ranges than the typical range of a syllable. This paper is about language recognition with the high-level prosodic attributes. It studies two important issues of long-range modeling, namely the data scarcity handling method, and the model which properly describes prosodic boundary events. Illustrated by ...

The paper analyzes both acoustic and linguistic features with different Chinese prosodic boundaries. Then a rule-learning approach was used to do the prosodic boundary labelling. In the paper the prosodic boundaries are classified into four levels, full intonational boundary with strong intonational marking with/without lengthening or change in speech tempo, prosodic phrase boundary with rather...

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic cues to extract words from a speech stream. We pr...

Prosodic phrase structure provides important information for the understanding and naturalness of synthetic speech, and a good model of prosodic phrases has applications in both speech synthesis and speech understanding. This work describes a statistical model of an embedded hierarchy of prosodic phrase structure, motivated by results in linguistic theory. Each level of the hierarchy is modeled...