Modeling local context for pitch accent prediction

Abstract

Pitch accent placement is a major topic in intonational phonology research and its application to speech synthesis. What factors influence whether or not a word is made intonationally prominent or not is an open question. In this paper, we investigate how one aspect of a word's local context - its collocation with neighboring words - influences whether it is accented or not. Results of experiments on two transcribed speech corpora in a medical domain show that such collocation information is a useful predictor of pitch accent placement.