Detection of questions in Berber language using prosodic features

This paper focuses on the acquisition of the tonal and prosodic structure of affirmative and question sentences in Berber language. The study on the prosodic differences between these two types of sentences in Berber language, the detection and classification of sentence type is the main subject of this paper. We´ve realized a system for segmentation and automatic detection of sentence type based on both prosodic, in Berber language, a language where all studies until now are still preliminary. To this end, we developed a corpus made of 720 utterances that were extracted from 6 Berber spoken lectures. Prosodic features are, then, extracted from each sentence. These features are used as input to two different classifiers to classify each sentence into either a question or affirmative sentence. We classified questions with an accuracy of 93%. A feature-specific analysis further reveals that energy and fundamental frequency (F0) features are mainly responsible for discriminating between question and affirmative sentences.