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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. 403–432

Chapter 8
Comparing annotations for the prosodic segmentation of spontaneous speech

Focus on reference units

| University of Florence – LABLITA
| Universityy of Florence – LABLITA
| Federal University of Minas Gerais

This chapter reports a quantitative and qualitative comparison of seven annotations performed on the same two American English texts: a monologue and a dialogue. The analysis of these data is complex, since the annotations have been made independently by each research group on the basis of their own theoretical frameworks. Despite this difference, the fundamental role of prosody in the analysis of speech emerges clearly in every annotation. Prosodic breaks can be then viewed as theory independent entities. After summarizing the key features of theoretical models, we derived a unified tagset and developed a web application (SLAC) to compare different annotations. Finally, agreement on prosodic breaks has been measured in different ways, reporting promising results in terminal break identification.

Keywords: spoken language models, segmentation criteria, prosodic breaks, annotation comparison, agreement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Comparing the different theoretical perspectives
    • 2.1Preliminary remarks
    • 2.2The segmentation of the speech flow into discrete units
    • 2.3The relation between prosody and syntax
    • 2.4The nature of the reference units for spoken speech
  • 3.The SLAC database
    • 3.1Web interface
    • 3.2The Unified Tagset
  • 4.Overall agreement
    • 4.1Starting data and preliminary choices
    • 4.2Interpreting the data
    • 4.3Standard agreement
  • 5.Pairwise agreement
    • 5.1ANY: agreement on prosodic break perception
    • 5.2OTB: agreement on terminal break
    • 5.3Strong and weak disagreement
    • 5.4Weighted agreement
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.17pan
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