Prosody, focus, and focal structure : some remarks on methodology

Prosody falls between several established fields as e.g. phonetics, phonology, syntax, and dialogue structure. It is therefore prone to misconceptions: often, its relevancy is overestimated, and often, it is underestimated. The traditional method in linguistics in general and in phonology in particular is the construction and evaluation of sometimes rather complex examples based on the intuition of the linguist. This intuition is replaced by more or less naive and thus non-expert subjects and inferential statistics in experimental phonetics but the examples, i.e. the experimental material, are often rather complex as well. It is a truism that in both cases, conclusions are made on an "as if\u27; basis: as if a final proof had been found that the phenomenon A really exists regularily in the language B. In fact, it only can be proven that the phenomenon A sometimes can be detected in the production of some speakers of a variety of language B. This dilemma matters if prosody has to be put into practice, e.g. in automatic speech and language processing. In this field, large speech databases are already available for English and will be available for other languages as e.g. German in the near future. At least in the beginning, the problems that can - hopefully - be solved with the help of such databases might look trivial and thus not interesting - a step backwards and not forwards. "As if\u27; statements (concerning, e.g., narrow vs. broad focus) and problems that are trivial at face value (concerning, e.g., the relationship between phrasing units and accentuation and the ontology of sentence accent) will be illustrated with own material. I will argue that such trivial problems have to be dealt with in the beginning, and that they can constitute the very basis for the proper treatment of more far reaching and complex problems

What´s in the "pure" prosody?

Detectors for accents and phrase boundaries have been developed which derive prosodic features from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available.The detectors underlying Gaussian distribution classifiers were trained with 50 minutes and tested with 30 minutes of spontaneous speech, yielding recognition rates of 74% for accents and 86% for phrase boundaries. Since this material was prosodically hand labelled, the question was, which labels for phrase boundaries and accentuation were only guided by syntactic or semantic knowledge, and which ones are really prosodically marked.Therefore a small test subset has been resynthesized in such a way that comprehensibility was lost, but the prosodic characteristics were kept. This subset has been re-labelled by 11listeners with nearly the same accuracy as the detectors

Detection of accents, phrase boundaries, and sentence modality in German

In this paper detectors for accents, phrase boundaries, and sentence modality are described which derive prosodic features only from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available. A new method for interpolating and decomposing the fundamental frequency is suggested. The detectors\u27 underlying Gaussian distribution classifiers were trained and tested with approximately 50 minutes of spontaneous speech, yielding recognition rates of 78 percent for accents, 80 percent for phrase boundaries, and 85 percent for sentence modality

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

Detection of phrase boundaries and accents

On a large speech database read by untrained speakers experiments for the recognition of phrase boundaries and phrase accents were performed. We used durational features as well as features derived from pitch and energy contours and pause information. Different sets of features were compared. For distinguishing three different boundary classes a recognition rate of 75.7% and for distinguishing accentuated from unaccentuated syllables a recognition rate of 88.7% could be achieved