Automatic Rhythm and Speech Rate Analysis of Mising Spontaneous Speech

Abstract

The objective of this current study is to analyse rhythm measures and speech rate of Mising, a low resource language spoken in the NE region of India. In this work, two Mising dialects - Pagru and Delu - are considered, along with Assamese to study their rhythmic characteristics in the case of spontaneous speech. Rhythm metric measures are generally computed from the annotated speech regions. However, for spontaneous speech, hand-annotation may be difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, this work explores the vowel onset point and offset point detection algorithm to automate the rhythm measure calculation process. Results show that Mising varieties are stressed-timed as compared to mora-timed Assamese language. Finally, automatically computed rhythm measures and speech rate are explored for classifying Assamese and Mising using machine learning models.