betweenEnergyandPitchAccentinReadEnglishSpeech.ppt

9/18/2006 On the Correlation between Energy and Pitch Accent in Read English Speech Andrew Rosenberg, Julia Hirschberg Columbia University Interspeech 2006 9/14/06 Talk Outline Introduction to Pitch Accent Previous Work Contribution and Approach Corpus Results and Discussion Conclusion Future Work Introduction Pitch Accent is the way a word is made to “stand out” from its surrounding utterance. As opposed to lexical stress which refers to the most prominent syllable within a word. Accurate detection of pitch accent is particularly important to many NLU tasks. Identification of salient or “important” words. Indication of Information Status. Disambiguation of Syntax/Semantics. Pitch (f0), Duration, and Energy are all known correlates of Pitch Accent Previous Work (Sluijter and van Heuven 96,97): Accent in Dutch strongly correlates with the energy of a word extracted from the frequency subband 500Hz. (Heldner, et al. 99,01) and (Fant, et al. 00) found that high-frequency emphasis or spectral tilt strongly correlates with accent in Swedish. A lot of research attention has been given to the automatic identification of prominent or accented words. (Tamburini 03,05) used the energy component of the 500Hz-2000Hz band. (Tepperman 05) used the RMS energy from the 60Hz-400Hz band And many more... Contribution and Approach There is no agreement as to the best -- most discriminative -- frequency subband from which to extract energy information. We set up a battery of analysis-by-classification experiments varying: The frequency band: lower bound frequency ranged from 0 to 19 bark bandwidth ranged from 1 to 20 bark upper bound was 20 bark by the 8KHz Nyquist rate Also, analyzed the first and/or second formants. The region of analysis: Full word, only vowels, longest syllable, longest vowel Speaker: Each of 4 speakers separately, and all together. We performed the experiments using J48 -- a java implementation of C4.5. Contribution and Approach Local Features: minimum, maxim