Abstract
The paper describes an attempt of the automatic detection of prominence which was marked by experts in prosodic annotation of recorded read aloud Russian texts (duration of the analyzed recording is 2 hours). The material is part of the CORPRES, a large speech corpus of Russian professionally read speech. Prominence labels obtained in prosodic annotation of recorded material were compared with the essential acoustical features, which revealed that perceived prominence that is defined by listeners judgments, refers to syllables that stand out from the phonetic environment in several ways, some of them were not considered in previous studies. It can be manifested as the deviation from the declination line either in a form of an F0 upstep or F0 drop, their choice being defined by the type of the global melodic contour of the intonational unit. This information along with the acoustical measurements has been used in automatic detection of prominence in Russian read aloud texts.
The F0 declination observed in Russian, as in many other languages, conveys linguistic information. Being characteristic of terminal declaratives and not typical for a particular type of interrogatives (general questions), it may signal a sentence type. A change in the global F0 declination line conveys information about the syntactic structure of the sentence: a declination reset often occurs at the intonation unit boundaries, representing different types of clauses. Experimental data obtained in the analysis of the recorded Russian read speech show that phonetic manifestation of prominence may take the form of deviations from the F0 global trend: an upward twist from F0 declination line is perceptually relevant. It often corresponds to the perceived prominence and triggers the assignment of the emphatic accent to a particular word in the prosodic annotation.
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Volskaya, N., Kocharov, D., Skrelin, P., Shumovskaya, E. (2013). Towards Automatic Detection of Various Types of Prominence in Read Aloud Russian Texts. In: Przepiórkowski, A., Piasecki, M., Jassem, K., Fuglewicz, P. (eds) Computational Linguistics. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 458. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34399-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34399-5_11
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