Automatic Prosody Labelling and Assessment

Automatic prosody labelling is a useful front-end for automatic speech recognition, for automatic speech understanding, and for the development of corpora used to create speech synthesizers. Automatic labelling of prosody has also proven to be quite useful in the linguistic analysis of new speaking styles in a known language. This chapter provides a survey of the state-of-the-art best practices and open questions in the automatic labelling of prosodic information and its assessment. It describes the major prosodic inventories that are used in prosody labelling. It then discusses the relevance of acoustics and syntax in automatic labelling. A brief description of AuToBI, a tool that performs automatic ToBI labelling of US English, is provided. The chapter concludes by discussing methods of evaluating automatic prosody labelling.