Phonetic Detail in Intonation Contour Dynamics

National audienceThe Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonation investigates the relationship between f0 contours and post-lexical meaning. Phonetic data are represented in the phonology as a sequence of discrete, local events. The properties of the transitions between one event and the next are considered to be phonologically irrelevant (§1). We present data on Neapolitan Italian which show a significant correlation between the shape of these transitions and the pragmatic context in which a sentence is uttered. This correlation is stronger than the one displayed by traditional autosegmental-metrical indices (§2 and §3). In the conclusions, we discuss the usefulness of our findings as a step towards the finetuning of the autosegmental-metrical theory (§4)

The phonology of melodic prominence: the structure of melisms

International audienceThis paper aims at proposing a surface phonological tonal annotation and stylization fitted to the lexical space. More precisely it makes it possible to phonologically structure the F0 variations in prominent words. In previous studies, this specific F0 configuration in such words has been called melism. These principles are integrated in an automatic procedure (INTSMEL) which supplies an automatic Praat TextGrid labelling. In the overall procedure, INTSMEL (and/or INTSINT) is applied to the output of the MOMEL algorithm which computes targets and modelled F0 contour. INTSINT and INTSMEL have complementary goals: the former is devoted to the annotation of intonation, the latter to the (prominent) word (or suite of words) annotation. The aim of this paper is to describe this annotation method, previously to its exploitation and evaluation in forthcoming papers

The phonology of melodic prominence: the structure of melisms

International audienceThis paper aims at proposing a surface phonological tonal annotation and stylization fitted to the lexical space. More precisely it makes it possible to phonologically structure the F0 variations in prominent words. In previous studies, this specific F0 configuration in such words has been called melism. These principles are integrated in an automatic procedure (INTSMEL) which supplies an automatic Praat TextGrid labelling. In the overall procedure, INTSMEL (and/or INTSINT) is applied to the output of the MOMEL algorithm which computes targets and modelled F0 contour. INTSINT and INTSMEL have complementary goals: the former is devoted to the annotation of intonation, the latter to the (prominent) word (or suite of words) annotation. The aim of this paper is to describe this annotation method, previously to its exploitation and evaluation in forthcoming papers

Towards the automatic processing of Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan): developing a 'light' acoustic model of the target language and testing 'heavyweight' models from five national languages

International audienceAutomatic speech processing technologies hold great potential to facilitate the urgent task of documenting the world's languages. The present research aims to explore the application of speech recognition tools to a little-documented language, with a view to facilitating processes of annotation, transcription and linguistic analysis. The target language is Yongning Na (a.k.a. Mosuo), an unwritten Sino-Tibetan language with less than 50,000 speakers. An acoustic model of Na was built using CMU Sphinx. In addition to this 'light' model, trained on a small data set (only 4 hours of speech from 1 speaker), 'heavyweight' models from five national languages (English, French, Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer) were also applied to the same data. Preliminary results are reported, and perspectives for the long road ahead are outlined

Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations

International audienceThe present article aims to propose a simple introduction to the topics of (i) lexical tone, (ii) intonation, and (iii) tone-intonation interactions, with practical recommendations for students. It builds on the authors' observations on various languages, tonal and non-tonal; much of the evidence reviewed concerns tonal languages of Asia. With a view to providing beginners with an adequate methodological apparatus for studying tone and intonation, the present notes emphasize two salient dimensions of linguistic diversity. The first is the nature of the lexical tones: we review the classical distinction between (i) contour tones that can be analyzed into sequences of level tones, and (ii) contour tones that are non-decomposable (phonetically complex). A second dimension of diversity is the presence or absence of intonational tones: tones of intonational origin that are formally identical with lexical (and morphological) tones

Feasibility report: Delivering case-study based learning using artificial intelligence and gaming technologies

This document describes an investigation into the technical feasibility of a game to support learning based on case studies. Information systems students using the game will conduct fact-finding interviews with virtual characters. We survey relevant technologies in computational linguistics and games. We assess the applicability of the various approaches and propose an architecture for the game based on existing techniques. We propose a phased development plan for the development of the game

Design and Evaluation of Shared Prosodic Annotation for Spontaneous French Speech: From Expert Knowledge to Non-Expert Annotation

International audienceIn the area of large French speech corpora, there is a demonstrated need for a common prosodic notation system allowing for easy data exchange, comparison, and automatic annotation. The major questions are: (1) how to develop a single simple scheme of prosodic transcription which could form the basis of guidelines for non-expert manual annotation (NEMA), used for linguistic teaching and research; (2) based on this NEMA, how to establish reference prosodic corpora (RPC) for different discourse genres (Cresti and Moneglia, 2005); (3) how to use the RPC to develop corpus-based learning methods for automatic prosodic labelling in spontaneous speech (Buhman et al., 2002; Tamburini and Caini 2005, Avanzi, et al. 2010). This paper presents two pilot experiments conducted with a consortium of 15 French experts in prosody in order to provide a prosodic transcription framework (transcription methodology and transcription reliability measures) and to establish reference prosodic corpora in French

Gesture Theory is Linguistics: On Modelling Multimodality as Prosody

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200