Intonational Correlates of Discourse Structures

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IRI-9443461 Grosz, Barbara Harvard University $235,052 - 24 mos. (Jointly funded with Cross Disciplinary Activities - Total Award $240,752) Intonational Correlates of Discourse Structures This is the second part funding of a standard award initiated in FY93 and processed as a swing grant to conduct research on the empirical verification of the Grosz-Sidner theory of structural discourse analysis, and on the correlation of intonational indicators with both global and local structures of discourse. The subject of study is a multiple speaker corpus (to assure generality of results and experiments that can be replicated) of discourse from instructional and narrative genres; the corpus is annotated subjectively for structural characteristics and, independently and objectively, for intonational features using signal analysis methods, with the purpose of establishing the correlation between the two taggings. A positive, well-established, correlation would allow the use of those discourse features indicating intonational variations in algorithms that produce corresponding intonational variations in synthesized speech of quality higher ordinary. The results of this project should establish the relationship between discourse structures and the phonetically determined signal features of discourse.