Detection of sentence boundaries in polish based on acoustic cues

Abstract

In this article the authors investigated and presented the experiments on the sentence boundaries annotation from Polish speech using acoustic cues as a source of information. The main result of the investigation is an algorithm for detection of the syntactic boundaries appearing in the places of punctuation marks. In the first stage, the algorithm detects pauses and divides a speech signal into segments. In the second stage, it verifies the configuration of acoustic features and puts hypotheses of the positions of punctuation marks. Classification is performed with parameters describing phone duration and energy, speaking rate, fundamental frequency contours and frequency bands. The best results were achieved for Naive Bayes classifier. The efficiency of the algorithm is 52% precision and 98% recall. Another significant outcome of the research is statistical models of acoustic cues correlated with punctuation in spoken Polish.