Title:	Web Harvest of Minimal Intonational Pairs
Authors:	Howell, Jonathan Rooth, Mats
Keywords:	intonation focus web as corpus machine learning prosody comparatives speech recognition linguistics
Issue Date:	2-Jul-2009
Abstract:	This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issues of the phonetics-phonology and semantics-pragmatics of intonation. The target data are tokens of fixed word strings like "than I did", where intonation varies in a way which correlates with grammatical and pragmatic context. In a web harvest procedure, audio files were identified using a search engine based in speech-to-text, downloaded, and cut to a relevant segment under program control. In an application of such a database, an SVM classifier was trained to make a grammatically determined distinction in intonation based on purely acoustic cues. Sources of error in the retrieval are quantified.
Description:	Preliminary version of paper to be presented at Web as Corpus 5, September 2009. Final version will be substituted on July 17, 2009.
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/1813/13079
Appears in Collections:	Linguistics - Monographs, Papers and Research

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