Abstract
This paper presents some models based on multiple phonetic-acoustic parameters for the automatic detection of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous speech. A sample with seven excerpts of monologic Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech was segmented into prosodic units by 14 trained annotators. The perceived prosodic boundaries were annotated as terminal or non-terminal prosodic boundaries. A Praat script was prepared in order to extract a set of acoustic parameters during the speech signal. Two statistical classifiers, namely Random Forest e Linear Discriminant Analysis, were used to generate models of subgroups of acoustic parameters that could work as predictors of prosodic boundaries in comparison with the human annotators. The initial evaluation of the classifiers showed that both present relative success in detecting boundaries. The LDA performed better in predicting boundaries and therefore its models were refined. The final model for terminal boundaries showed 80% of agreement with human annotators. As for non-terminal boundaries, three models were obtained. The sum of boundaries identified by the three models together corresponds to an agreement of 98% with the human annotators.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Schubiger, M.: English Intonation: Its Form and Function. Niemeyer, Tübingen (1958)
Chafe, W.: The deployment of consciousness in the production of a narrative. In: Chafe, W. (ed.) The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, pp. 9–50. Ablex, Norwood (1980). (Org.)
Schuetze-Coburn, S.: Prosody, syntax, and discourse pragmatics: assessing information flow in German conversation. Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles (1994)
Ladd, R.: Intonational Phonology, 2nd edn. CUP, Cambridge (2008)
Cooper, W., Paccia Cooper, J.: Syntax and Speech. Harvard Universty Press, Cambridge (1980)
Selkirk, E. Comments on Intonational phrasing in English. In: Frota, S., Vigário, M., Freitas, M.J. (eds.) Prosodies, pp. 11–58. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2005)
Halliday, M.A.K.: Speech and Situation. University College, London (1965)
Cresti, E.: Corpus di Italiano parlato, vol. 1. Accademia della Crusca, Firenze (2000)
Szczepek Reed, B.: Prosody, syntax and action formation: intonation phrases and action components. In: Bergmann, P. et al. (eds.), Prosody and Embodiment in Interactional Grammar, pp. 142–169. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2012)
Chafe, W.: Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Dsiplacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1994)
Croft, W.: Intonation Units and grammatical structure. Linguistics 33(5), 839–882 (1995)
Bybee, J.: Language, Usage and Cognition. CUP, Cambridge (2010)
Barth-Weingarten, D.: Intonation Units Revised: Cesuras in Talk-in-Interaction. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia (2016)
Pike, L.: The Intonation of American English. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (1945)
Pierrehumbert, J. Phonetics and phonology of English intonation. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1980)
Schegloff, E.: Reflections on studying prosody in talk-in-interaction. Lang. Speech 41(3–4), 235–263 (1998)
Szczepek Reed, B.: Turn-final intonation in English. In: Couper-Kuhlen, E., Ford, C. (eds.), Sound Patterns in Interaction, pp. 97–117. Benjamins, Amsterdam (2004)
Avanzi, M., Lacheret-Dujour, A., Victorri, B.: A tool for semi-automatic annotation of french prosodic structure. In: ANALOR, pp. 119–122, Campinas, Brazil, (2008)
Ni, C.J., Zhang, A.Y., Liu, W.J., Xu, B.: Automatic prosodic break detection and feature analysis. J. Comput. Sci. Tchol. 27, 1184–1196 (2012)
Kim, J.: Automatic detection of sentence boundaries, disfluencies, and conversational fillers in spontaneous speech. 103 f. Ph.D. University of Washington (2004)
Raso, T., Mello, H. (Org.): C-ORAL-BRASIL I: corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal, 1 edn. UFMG, Belo Horizonte (2012)
Raso, T., Mello, H. (Org.): C-ORAL-BRASIL II: corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal (forthcoming)
Mello, H.R. et al.: Transcrição e segmentação prosódica do corpus C-ORAL-BRASIL: critérios de implementação e validação. In: Raso, T., Mello, H.R. (eds.) C-ORAL-Brasil I: Corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal, pp. 125–176. Editora UFMG, Belo Horizonte (2012)
Fleiss, J.L.: Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychol. Bull. 76(5), 378–382 (1971)
Boersma, P., Weenink, D. Praat: doing phonetics by computer. 2015. Software http://www.praat.org/. Accessed 16 Jan 2015
Barbosa, P.: Semi-automatic and automatic tools for generating prosodic descriptors for prosody research. In: Bigi, B., Hirst, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody, vol. 13, pp. 86–89. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Language (2013). http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~trasp/Proceedings/19874-trasp2013.pdf
Barbosa, P.: BreakDescriptor (Versão 1.0) [Programa de computador] (2016). Available with the author
R Development Core Team: R a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Teixeira, B., Barbosa, P., Raso, T. (2018). Automatic Detection of Prosodic Boundaries in Brazilian Portuguese Spontaneous Speech. In: Villavicencio, A., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_43
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_43
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99721-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99722-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)