Browsing by Author "Hirschberg, Julia"
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- Extending AuToBI to prominence detection in European PortuguesePublication . Moniz, Helena; Mata, Ana Isabel; Hirschberg, Julia; Batista, Fernando; Rosenberg, Andrew; Trancoso, IsabelThis paper describes our exploratory work in applying the Automatic ToBI annotation system (AuToBI), originally developed for Standard American English, to European Portuguese. This work is motivated by the current availability of large amounts of (highly spontaneous) transcribed data and the need to further enrich those transcripts with prosodic information. Manual prosodic annotation, however, is almost impractical for extensive data sets. For that reason, automatic systems such as AuToBi stand as an alternate solution. We have started by applying the AuToBI prosodic event detection system using the existing English models to the prediction of prominent prosodic events (accents) in European Portuguese. This approach achieved an overall accuracy of 74% for prominence detection, similar to state-of-the-art results for other languages. Later, we have trained new models using prepared and spontaneous Portuguese data, achieving a considerable improvement of about 6% accuracy (absolute) over the existing English models. The achieved results are quite encouraging and provide a starting point for automatically predicting prominent events in European Portuguese.
- Teenage and Adult Speech in School Context: Building and Processing a Corpus of European PortuguesePublication . Mata, Ana Isabel; Moniz, Helena; Batista, Fernando; Hirschberg, JuliaWe present a corpus of European Portuguese spoken by teenagers and adults in school context, CPE-FACES, with an overview of the differential characteristics of high school oral presentations and the challenges this data poses to automatic speech processing. The CPE-FACES corpus has been created with two main goals: to provide a resource for the study of prosodic patterns in both spontaneous and prepared unscripted speech, and to capture inter-speaker and speaking style variations common at school, for research on oral presentations. Research on speaking styles is still largely based on adult speech. References to teenagers are sparse and cross-analyses of speech types comparing teenagers and adults are rare. We expect CPE-FACES, currently a unique resource in this domain, will contribute to filling this gap in European Portuguese. Focusing on disfluencies and phrase-final phonetic-phonological processes we show the impact of teenage speech on the automatic segmentation of oral presentations. Analyzing fluent final intonation contours in declarative utterances, we also show that communicative situation specificities, speaker status and cross gender differences are key factors in speaking style variation at school.