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The Speech Corpus for Studying Phonetic Properties of Irony

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Language, Music and Gesture: Informational Crossroads

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology and result of constructing the corpus of Russian ironic speech. The aim of our research is to obtain proper material for studying the phonetic features of ironic and non-ironic speech. There is still no comprehensive description of the acoustic cues of irony in speech for both Russian and other languages. Nevertheless, this information is highly needed in dialogue systems using speech technology, the importance of which has extremely increased recently. This information is also very important for studying the Russian as a foreign language. A pilot corpus of ironic speech was compiled based on the material from open sources. Its analysis allowed us creating sets of short texts and dialogues, as well as coherent texts with irony that were read by Russian native speakers. Simultaneous audio and video recordings were carried out in a soundproof booth. The perception experiments showed a high percentage of the well recognized ironic and non-ironic target stimuli from the recorded material presented with no marker or context. The acoustic analysis revealed the existence of the phonetic cues that differ ironic and non-ironic speech. The data obtained prove the effectiveness of the developed method of the corpus construction.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the RFBR grant No 20-012-00552.

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Correspondence to Uliana Kochetkova .

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Kochetkova, U., Skrelin, P., Evdokimova, V., Novoselova, D. (2021). The Speech Corpus for Studying Phonetic Properties of Irony. In: Chernigovskaya, T., Eismont, P., Petrova, T. (eds) Language, Music and Gesture: Informational Crossroads. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3742-1_16

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