Chapter published in:
In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language: A corpus-driven approach
Edited by Shlomo Izre'el, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi and Tommaso Raso
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 94] 2020
► pp. 285–300

Chapter 9
Cross-linguistic comparison of automatic detection of speech breaks in read and narrated speech in four languages

| State University of Campinas, Institute for Language Studies, CNPq
This chapter tests an algorithm for the automatic detection of speech breaks in read and narrated speech in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), European Portuguese (EP), French, and German. The algorithm is independent of previous transcription or linguistic analysis (syllable, phone labeling and segmentation), requiring only the audio file. It operates in two stages: vowel onsets detection firstly, followed by V-to-V duration intervals normalization for smoothed duration z-scores. Peaks over 2.5 of the latter were considered speech breaks. Compared to human segmentation, hits for reading (70%) were higher than for narration (60%). Crosslinguistic results show EP and French having the highest proportion of hits. A test with the English Navy audio file reveals a hit proportion similar to German.
Keywords: automatic speech segmentation, duration, prosodic boundary, cross-linguistic comparison
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Corpus
    • 2.2The SalienceDetector script
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Testing with English spontaneous speech
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.09bar
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Izre'el, Shlomo, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi & Tommaso Raso
2020.  In In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo

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