INTSINT

Abstract: This paper presents a multilingual learners corpus, AixOx, collect-ed in the framework of an Alliance project (a partnership between the British Council and The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The corpus consists of the recording of 40 1-minute passages in English and French from the Eurom 1 corpus (Chan et al., 1995), read by native speakers and L2 learners. French native speakers reading the French and English passages were recorded in Aix-en-Provence, and English native speakers reading the English and French passages were recorded in Oxford. The AixOx corpus con-tains about 40 hours of read speech and can be downloaded from the “Speech and Language Data Repository” (http://sldr.org). This paper also presents the tools used for automatic anno-tation on several layers using algorithms: •SPPAS –SPeech Phonetization Alignment and Syllabifica-tion– (Bigi, 2012) for a segmentation into utterances, words, syllables and phonemes; •MoMel –Modelling Melody– and INTSINT –INternational Transcription System for INTonation– (Hirst, 2007) for the modelling and coding of intonation. Finally, an example of a pedagogical application of the cor-pus is given: a pilot-study on the intonation of questions. We show how the AixOx corpus can be used to compare the produc-tions of natives with learners and how it is possible, thanks to the annotation, to understand the prosodic realisations (whether they be positive or negative) and explain them. We conclude that AixOx, with its multi-layered annotation, is a very rich oral data-base for all kinds of studies on L1 productions, L2 productions, language contact, both at the segmental and supra-segmental levels since it offers a phonemic segmentation and alignment and a pro-sodic labelling.

Abstract: This paper aims at proposing a surface phonological tonal annotation and stylization fitted to the lexical space. More precisely it makes it possible to phonologically structure the F0 variations in prominent words. In previous studies, this specific F0 configuration in such words has been called melism. These principles are integrated in an automatic procedure (INTSMEL) which supplies an automatic Praat TextGrid labelling. In the overall procedure, INTSMEL (and/or INTSINT) is applied to the output of the MOMEL algorithm which computes targets and modelled F0 contour. INTSINT and INTSMEL have complementary goals: the former is devoted to the annotation of intonation, the latter to the (prominent) word (or suite of words) annotation. The aim of this paper is to describe this annotation method, previously to its exploitation and evaluation in forthcoming papers.

Abstract: Based on previous studies, this paper aims 1° at checking a new model of superficial phonology annotation in tonal sequences dedicated to the analysis of the F0 prominence structure in words (INTSMEL), whatever the language type, tonal or not, 2° at using it in a semantic and a pragmatic approach of spontaneous dialogue. INTSINT and INTSMEL are both integrated in the Praat speech analysis software, the former dedicated to the annotation of intonation, the latter to that of lexical prominence.

Abstract: This paper describes the contents of the Korean prosody corpus (Korean MULTEXT), which is a Korean version of the speech database Eurom1. The corpus consists of about 2 hours of read speech, transcribed primarily in orthography (in Korean alphabet and in a Romanized transcription), in IPA and in SAMPA. Furthermore, it includes the original F0 values, stylized F0 values extracted using Momel, and hand-corrected F0 values. The prosodic events are annotated in two ways. They are annotated with the automatic annotation algorithm, INTSINT, and also labeled manually into prosodic units with two tones on the hand-corrected pitch targets. It is found that the resulting tone patterns from the proposed Momel-based two tone labeling correspond to those defined in K-ToBI.