ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001

Boiling down prosody for the classification of boundaries and accents in German and English

Anton Batliner, Jan Buckow, Richard Huber, Volker Warnke, Elmar Nöth, Heinrich Niemann

In the focus of this paper is a comparison of the most relevant prosodic features/feature classes for the classification of boundaries and accents in German and in English. Principal components were computed based on a large prosodic feature vector; these principal components were used as predictor variables in a Linear Discriminant analysis as well as in a Classification and Regression Tree. The number of the most relevant principal components was between three and five; for both languages and for boundary and accent classification alike, most important were principal components modelling duration, in combination with energy, followed by pauses and F0.