ISCA Archive SSPR 2003
ISCA Archive SSPR 2003

Annotation conventions and corpus design in the investigation of spontaneous speech prosody in Taiwanese

Shu-Hui Peng, Mary E. Beckman

Understanding how intonational phrasing and focal prominence interact with lexically specified tone patterns is one of several problems in the investigation of speech processing in Chinese languages that cannot be addressed fully with read speech alone. This paper explores such problems for Taiwanese, one of the major languages in the southern Min dialect group. It outlines what is known about Taiwanese prosody and describes prosodic annotation conventions currently under development. It illustrates the problems with examples from a corpus of spontaneous speech dialogues and read versions of sentences extracted from the dialogue transcripts.