Expectations for discourse genre identification: a prosodic study

Abstract

Speech can be divided into discourse genres based on the contextual environment it occurs in (e.g. political speech, sport commentary speech, etc.). The present study investigated whether listeners can distinguish between speech from different discourse genres on the basis of acoustic prosodic cues only 1 . In a perception experiment with delexicalized speech 70 listeners with varying experience in French (native speakers, nonnative speakers, and non-speakers) were asked to identify four different types of discourse genres (church service, political, journal, and sport commentary). Results revealed a fair identification ability with a significant increase in performance with increasing experience in French. Identification confusion was used to cluster discourse genres according to their perceptual similarity. The possible application of the results for the evaluation of speaking style speech synthesis will be discussed.

Discrete/continuous modelling of speaking style in HMM-based speech synthesis: design and evaluation

“…The prosodic grammar consists of a hierarchical prosodic representation that was experimented as an alternative to ToBI [9] for French prosody labelling [10]. The prosodic grammar is composed of major prosodic boundaries (FM, a boundary which is right bounded by a pause), minor prosodic boundaries (Fm, an intermediate boundary), and prosodic prominences (P).…”

“…During the synthesis, the symbolic/acoustic parameters are generated in cascade, from the symbolic representation to the acoustic variations. Additionally, a rich linguistic description of the text characteristics is automatically extracted using a linguistic processing chain [9] and used to refine the context-dependent HMM modelling (see [10] and [11] for a detailed description of the enriched linguistic contexts). The prosodic grammar consists of a hierarchical prosodic representation that was experimented as an alternative to TOBI [12] for French prosody labelling [13].…”

Sport in the media: a contrasted study of three sport live media reports with semi-automatic tools

“…Sport live media report (SLMR) has received recent attention in prosodic studies from different perspectives. [1] evaluate this verbal activity as for its "phono-genre" consistency, as contrasted to three other speech genres (viz. radio news, political discourse, and religious discourse), through an identification test.…”