Speech prosody is known to be central in advanced communication technologies. However, despite the advances of theoretical studies in speech prosody, so far, no large scale prosody annotated resources that would facilitate empirical research and the development of empirical computational approaches are available. This is to a large extent due to the fact that current common prosody annotation conventions offer a descriptive framework of intonation contours and phrasing based on labels. This makes it difficult to reach a satisfactory inter-annotator agreement during the annotation of gold standard annotations and, subsequently, to create consistent large scale annotations. To address this problem, we present an annotation schema for prominence and boundary labeling of prosodic phrases based upon acoustic parameters and a tagger for prosody annotation at the prosodic phrase level. Evaluation proves that interannotator agreement reaches satisfactory values, from 0.60 to 0.80 Cohen’s kappa, while the prosody tagger achieves acceptable recall and f-measure figures for five spontaneous samples used in the evaluation of monologue and dialogue formats in English and Spanish. The work presented in this paper is a first step towards a semi-automatic acquisition of large corpora for empirical prosodic analysis.

This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number H2020-RIA-645012. It has been also partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502). The second author is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity through the Juan de la Cierva program.

Paper presented at COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2016 Dec 11-17; Osaka, Japan.