In this paper, we discuss the construction of an algorithm that classifies pitch movements according to the IPO intonation system. We use a pitch stylization technique in order to obtain a continuous pitch contour over time, and a multi-linear classifier for the actual classification. In speaker-independent tests on a corpus of speech read by non-professionals, up to 81 % of the 279 pitch movements in the test corpus were correctly classified. These results are obtained by using information from the sampled speech data files only; a grammar will be used in the second stage of this study.

Keywords: Automatic classification, multi-linear classification, IPO-intonation system, speech recognition.