Estimating speaking rate in spontaneous discourse

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the speaking rate directly from the speech waveform. We propose an algorithm that poses the speaking rate estimation problem as a convex optimization problem. In contrast to existing methods, we avoid the more difficult task of detecting individual syllables within the speech signal and we avoid heuristics like thresholding a loudness function. The algorithm was evaluated on the ICSI Switchboard spontaneous speech corpus and a speech corpus obtained from publicly-available interviews on Youtube.