Criteria for Labelling Prosodic Aspects of English Speech

Abstract

We report a set of labelling criteria which have been developed to label prosodic events in clear, continuous speech, and propose a scheme whereby this information can be transcribed in a machine readable format. We have chosen to annotate prosody in a syllabic domain which is synchronised with a phonemic segmentation. A procedural definition of syllables based on the grouping of phones is presented. The criteria for hand labelling the prominence of each syllable, tone-unit boundaries and the pitch movement associated with each accented syllable, are described. Work to automate this process is presented and experimental results evaluating its performance are included.