Automatic prosodic labeling and broad class Phonetic Engine for Malayalam

This paper describes an approach to automatic labeling of prosodic events and discusses about the implementation of broad class phonetic engine for Malayalam. Phonetic Engine (PE) which is the first stage of automatic speech recognition converts input speech to a sequence of phonetic symbols. A baseline phonetic engine is created based on speech data collected from various regions of Kerala consists of read speech, extempore, and conversational speech. In order to incorporate the prosodic information into baseline phonetic engine a new algorithm for automatic labeling of prosody is proposed. This algorithm is used to automatically label the pitch variations and pauses in speech utterance in order to represent the prosody.