Towards automatic language processing and intonational labeling in European Portuguese

Moniz, Helena; Batista, Fernando; Mata, Ana Isabel; Trancoso, Isabel

doi:10.1075/ihll.6.11mon

In:Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields
Edited by Meghan E. Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen and Maria del Mar Vanrell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6] 2016
► pp. 227–248

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Towards automatic language processing and intonational labeling in European Portuguese

Helena Moniz | Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Fernando Batista | Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores – Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa

Ana Isabel Mata | Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Isabel Trancoso | Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores – Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa

Published online: 31 March 2016

https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.6.11mon

This work describes a framework that encompasses multi-layered linguistic information, focusing on prosodic features (pitch, energy, and tempo patterns), uses such features to distinguish between sentence-form types and disfluency/fluency repairs, and contributes to the characterization of intonational patterns of spontaneous and prepared speech in European Portuguese. Different machine learning methods have been applied for discriminating between structural metadata events, both in university lectures and in map-task dialogues, containing large amounts of spontaneous speech. Results show that prosodic features, and particularly a set of very informative features, are crucial to distinguish between sentence-form types and disfluency/fluency repair events. This is the first work for European Portuguese on both fully automatic processing of multi-layered linguistically description of spoken corpora and intonational labeling.

Keywords: European Portuguese, prosody, speech processing, structural metadata

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