Syllable detection in read and spontaneous speech

Author

Pfitzinger, Hartmut R. ; Burger, Susanne ; Heid, Sebastian

Author_Institution

Inst. fur Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation, Munchen Univ., Germany

Volume

2

fYear

1996

fDate

3-6 Oct 1996

Firstpage

1261

Abstract

Automatic syllable detection is an important task when analysing very large speech corpora in order to answer questions concerning prosody, rhythm, speech rate, speech recognition and synthesis. A new method for automatic detection of syllable nuclei is presented. Two large spoken language corpora (PhonDatII, Verbmobil) were labelled by three phoneticians and then used to adjust the key parameters of the algorithm and to evaluate its error rate. Additionally, parts of the corpora were used to test the inter- and intra-individual consistency of the transcribers. The evaluation of the algorithm currently shows an error rate of 12.87% for read speech and 21.03% for spontaneous speech. The inter-individual consistency of 95.8% might be considered as an upper limit for any automatic detection method

Keywords

error analysis; speech processing; speech recognition; speech synthesis; algorithm parameter adjustment; automatic syllable detection; automatic syllable nuclei detection; error rate evaluation; inter-individual transcriber consistency; intra-individual transcriber consistency; large spoken language corpora; prosody; read speech; rhythm; speech rate; speech recognition; speech synthesis; spontaneous speech; very large speech corpora analysis; Automatic testing; Band pass filters; Cutoff frequency; Databases; Detectors; Error analysis; Finite impulse response filter; Rhythm; Speech analysis; Speech synthesis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Spoken Language, 1996. ICSLP 96. Proceedings., Fourth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Philadelphia, PA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3555-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSLP.1996.607838

Filename

607838