Automatic duration-related salience detection in Brazilian Portuguese read and spontaneous speech
Plínio Almeida Barbosa, University of Campinas
This work presents an automatic prosodic salience detector algorithm which does not require the use of language-specific duration values. It is implemented in two steps: automatic detection of vowel onsets (VO) followed by the detection of normalized VO-to-VO duration peaks. The algorithm's performance is compared to that of a semi-automatic version. Perceived salience is also compared. For both fast and slower read speech, precision and accuracy of perceived word salience are between 61 and 80\%. In a larger corpus of read and storytelling speech, precision is generally higher than 70\%, whereas accuracy is higher than 80\% when the automatic version is compared with the semi-automatic one. The automatic algorithm's performance is found to be similar to that of the prominence detector reported in Wang and Narayanan (2007).