A tool for automatic transcription of intonation: Eti_ToBI a ToBI transcriber for Spanish and Catalan

Abstract

This article presents Eti_ToBI, a tool that automatically labels intonational events in Spanish and Catalan utterances according to the Sp_ToBI and Cat_ToBI current conventions. The system consists in a Praat script that assigns ToBI labels to pitch movements basing the assignments on lexical data introduced by the researcher and the acoustical data that it extracts from sound files. The first part of the article explains the methodological approach that has made possible the automatisation and describes the algorithms used by the script to perform the analysis. The second part presents the reliability results for both Catalan and Spanish corpora showing a level of agreement equal to the one shown by human transcribers among them in the literature.