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Automatic Prosodic Break Detection and Feature Analysis

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Abstract

Automatic prosodic break detection and annotation are important for both speech understanding and natural speech synthesis. In this paper, we discuss automatic prosodic break detection and feature analysis. The contributions of the paper are two aspects. One is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin and English prosodic break using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus — Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse and the English prosodic annotation corpus — Boston University Radio News Corpus when compared with the baseline system and other researches' experimental results. The other is the feature analysis for prosodic break detection. The functions of different features, such as duration, pitch, energy, and intensity, are analyzed and compared in Mandarin and English prosodic break detection. Based on the feature analysis, we also verify some linguistic conclusions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematic and Quantitative Economics, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, 250014, China

    Chong-Jia Ni & Ai-Ying Zhang

  2. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Wen-Ju Liu & Bo Xu

Authors
  1. Chong-Jia Ni
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  2. Ai-Ying Zhang
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  3. Wen-Ju Liu
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  4. Bo Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chong-Jia Ni.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 90820303, 90820011, and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province of China under Grant No. ZR2011FQ024.

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Ni, CJ., Zhang, AY., Liu, WJ. et al. Automatic Prosodic Break Detection and Feature Analysis. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 27, 1184–1196 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1295-z

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