We investigate the correlation between pitch accents and semantic slots in human-machine speech. Using an automatic pitch accent detector on the ATIS corpus, we find that most words labelled with semantic slots also carry a pitch accent. Most of the pitch accented words that are not associated with a semantic label are still meaningful, pointing towards the speaker’s intention. Our findings show that prosody constitutes a relevant and useful resource for spoken language understanding, especially considering the fact that our pitch accent detector does not require any kind of manual transcriptions during testing time.
Cite as: Stehwien, S., Vu, N.T. (2016) Exploring the Correlation of Pitch Accents and Semantic Slots for Spoken Language Understanding. Proc. Interspeech 2016, 730-734, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2016-511
@inproceedings{stehwien16_interspeech,
author={Sabrina Stehwien and Ngoc Thang Vu},
title={{Exploring the Correlation of Pitch Accents and Semantic Slots for Spoken Language Understanding}},
year=2016,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2016},
pages={730--734},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2016-511}
}