ACOUSTICAL FEATURES AS PREDICTORS FOR PROMINENCE IN READ ALOUD DUTCH SENTENCES USED IN ANN’S


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Barbertje M. Streefkerk*, Louis C. W. Pols* and Louis F. M. ten Bosch**
*Institute of Phonetic Sciences Amsterdam (IFA) / IFOTT
**Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N. V., Belgium


ABSTRACT

In this paper we present several acoustical features, which are used as predictors for prominence. A set of 1244 sentences from 273 different speakers is selected from the Dutch Polyphone Corpus. Via listening experiments the subjective prominence markers are obtained. Several acoustical features concerning F 0, energy and duration are derived and used as predictors for prominence. The sentences are divided in a test and a training set, to test and train neural networks with different topologies and different input features. The first results show that a classification of prominent and non-prominent words is possible with 82.1% correct for an independent test set.