Assigning a prosodic transcription that encompasses all prosodic phenomena (intonation, accentuation and phrasing) is difficult mainly because: (i) encoding all the prosodic phenomena usually supposes a knowledge of the language to transcribe; and (ii) a representation of the various phenomena cannot be achieved without taking into account the three prosodic parameters. In this paper, we present a tool, PROSOTRAN, which automatically assigns to each utterance a multi-tiered transcription that symbolically represents how the three prosodic parameters (F0, duration & energy) do vary over time. Assigning labels to each syllable avoids segmenting the signal into linguistic units that are difficult to define when the language to transcribe is not known.

Index Terms: prosodic annotation systems, automatic annotation tools, phonetic implementation and phonological analysis