PROSODIC STRUCTURE REPRESENTATION FOR BOUNDARY DETECTION IN SPONTANEOUS FRENCH

Natalia Segal & Katarina Bartkova
France Telecom R&D Lannion

ID 1241
[full paper]

Automatic speech processing has recently turned to the treatment of continuous spontaneous speech, which demands, among many other issues, a representation of its prosodic organization. This paper presents a new approach to automatic prosodic boundary detection and prosodic unit structuring, based, with certain changes, on a descriptive theory of the French prosodic system initially proposed for prepared speech. This theory had been transformed into a set of rules so as to create a hierarchical representation of a phrase in spontaneous French in the form of a prosodic tree. The method had been manually verified and then applied to a spontaneous speech database in order to obtain a statistical description of prosodic structures.