Reliable Prominence Identification in English Spontaneous Speech

This paper presents a follow up of a study on the automatic detection of prosodic prominence in spontaneous speech. Prosodic prominence involves two different prosodic features, pitch accent and stress, that are typically based on four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0) movements, overall syllable energy, syllable nuclei duration and mid-to-high-frequency emphasis. A careful measurement of these acoustic parameters makes it possible to build an automatic system capable of identifying prominent syllables in utterances with performance comparable with the inter-human agreement reported in the literature even when tested on spontaneous speech.