Prosodic transcription of Glasgow English: an evaluation study of GlaToBI

GlaToBI, a version of the ToBI prosodic transcription system which can be used to transcribe the intonation patterns of western Scottish (Glasgow) English, is currently under development. An assessment of GlaToBI, similar to the evaluation studies that were undertaken for the original ToBI system [7], and for GToBI, a version developed for German [4], has been carried out to test the new system 's reliability, learnability and comprehensiveness. The results of this study show that this adaptation of the ToBI system can be applied with the expected level of reliability to the transcription of Glasgow English. 1. INTRODUCTION Very little corpus based work has been done on the prosodic features of English dialects other than Standard American and southern British (Received Pronunciation). However, with the creation of databases such as the University of Edinburgh's HCRC Map Task corpus [1], the predominant dialect of which is western Scottish (Glasgow) English, the opportunity has arisen..

Inter-transcriber reliability for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch)

Speech researchers often rely on human annotation of prosody to generate data to test hypotheses and generate models. We present an overview of two prosodic annotation systems: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) (Silverman et al., 1992), and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch) (Dilley & Brown, 2005), which was designed to address several limitations of ToBI. The paper reports two large-scale studies of inter-transcriber reliability for ToBI and RaP. Comparable reliability for both systems was obtained for a variety of prominence- and boundary-related agreement categories. These results help to establish RaP as an alternative to ToBI for research and technology applicationsNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant BCS 0847653

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Resisting the Tradition of Sexism

I stood there, or rather wobbled, standing on a plastic chair, peering over the division of a wall. Three feet away, I saw a boy reading from the Torah. There were men embracing, women cheering from across the wall, and rounds of applause on both sides. I stepped down from the chair and glanced at the sky. In my view, a large barrier towered over me, piercing the blue-- the Western Wall. My haze was then suddenly interrupted by a woman frantically mounting the chair I had previously been standing on. She was desperate to get a view of the boy on his Bar Mitzvah day. Frazzled, I redirected my focus to a new woman with dark hair. She looked as if she was trying to jump across the barrier that separated the men from the women. It was her son’s Bar Mitzvah day, and all she could do was watch from afar. All I could do was watch from afar because I am a woman

RV Pelagia Cruise 64PE219, 05 Nov – 24 Nov 2003. TOBI surveys of Setubal and Nazarre Canyons and of the MV Prestige wreck site, west of Iberia

The main objective of the cruise was to collect TOBI sidescan sonar imagery over three areas of the continental margin west of Iberia, where sediment transport studies are being undertaken as part of the EC funded ‘EUROSTRATFORM’ project. The three study areas were:1. The Setubal Canyon, between 38° to 38° 20’N on the continental margin. Here it wasplanned to image the canyon with a single 6 km-wide swath from the shelf edge near200m to the abyssal plain at depths exceeding 4800m2. The Nazarre Canyon, between 39° 30’ and 40°N on the continental margin. The survey plan was similar to that for Setubal Canyon, but with two parallel swaths over the lower reaches of the canyon, where it broadens into a 10 km wide channel crossing the continental rise.3. The Prestige tanker wreck site, at 42°N, 12°W, on the west flank of Galicia Bank, offnorthwest Spain. Here the aim was to investigate the stability of the slope where thetanker was lying. This part of the project was carried out jointly with UTM-CMIMA(CSIC), Barcelona, Spain.Although some time was lost to bad weather and equipment problems, excellent TOBI images were obtained over all three of the areas studied during Pelagia cruise 219. The cruise objectives were fully completed in areas 1 and 3, and about 60% of the expected area was surveyed in area 2, where almost three days were lost to bad weather

RRS James Cook Cruise 35, 7-19 Jun 2009. Sidescan sonar mapping of the Whittard Canyon, Celtic Margin

James Cook cruise 035 was aimed at the detailed mapping of the Whittard Canyon system along the Celtic Margin (NE Atlantic). In 12 days, &gt;700 km of track-lines were surveyed with the Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument (TOBI, carrying a 30 kHz sidescan sonar system with phase bathymetry capability, an 8 kHz chirp profiler and a magnetometer) and 6130 km2 of shipborne multibeam data was acquired over the 4 main branches of the canyon. This comprehensive and highly detailed dataset will provide new insights in canyon morphology, formation, sediment transport processes and into the resulting spatial distribution of benthic habitats. In addition, the data formed an indispensable base map for the planning of ROV dives during the follow-on cruise JC036.<br/

RV Sonne Cruise 200, 11 Jan-11 Mar 2009. Jakarta - Jakarta

All plate boundaries are divided into segments - pieces of fault that are distinct from oneanother, either separated by gaps or with different orientations. The maximum size of anearthquake on a fault system is controlled by the degree to which the propagating rupture cancross the boundaries between such segments. A large earthquake may rupture a whole segmentof plate boundary, but a great earthquake usually ruptures more than one segment at once.The December 26th 2004 MW 9.3 earthquake and the March 28th 2005 MW 8.7 earthquakeruptured, respectively, 1200–1300 km and 300–400 km of the subduction boundary betweenthe Indian-Australian plate and the Burman and Sumatra blocks. Rupture in the 2004 eventstarted at the southern end of the fault segment, and propagated northwards. The observationthat the slip did not propagate significantly southwards in December 2004, even though themagnitude of slip was high at the southern end of the rupture strongly suggests a barrier at thatplace. Maximum slip in the March 2005 earthquake occurred within ~100 km of the barrierbetween the 2004 and 2005 ruptures, confirming both the physical importance of the barrier,and the loading of the March 2005 rupture zone by the December 2004 earthquake.The Sumatran Segmentation Project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council(NERC), aims to characterise the boundaries between these great earthquakes (in terms of bothsubduction zone structure at scales of 101-104 m and rock physical properties), record seismicactivity, improve and link earthquake slip distribution to the structure of the subduction zoneand to determine the sedimentological record of great earthquakes (both recent and historic)along this part of the margin. The Project is focussed on the areas around two earthquakesegment boundaries: Segment Boundary 1 (SB1) between the 2004 and 2005 ruptures atSimeulue Island, and SB2 between the 2005 and smaller 1935 ruptures between Nias and theBatu Islands.Cruise SO200 is the third of three cruises which will provide a combined geophysical andgeological dataset in the source regions of the 2004 and 2005 subduction zone earthquakes.SO200 was divided into two Legs. Leg 1 (SO200-1), Jakarta to Jakarta between January 22ndand February 22nd, was composed of three main operations: longterm deployment OBSretrieval, TOBI sidescan sonar survey and coring. Leg 2 (SO200-2), Jakarta to Jakarta betweenFebruary 23rd and March 11th, was composed of two main operations: Multichannel seismicreflection (MCS) profiles and heatflow probe transects