Chapter published in:
In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language: A corpus-driven approachEdited by Shlomo Izre'el, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi and Tommaso Raso
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 94] 2020
► pp. 285–300
Chapter 9Cross-linguistic comparison of automatic detection of speech breaks in read and
narrated speech in four languages
Plínio A. Barbosa | 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.
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
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.09bar
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