Workshop on ToBI for Spontaneous English Speech

在国家科学基金会的支持下，西蒙斯学院将于2004年8月13日至15日举办一个关于音调和中断指数（ToBI）标记系统的国际研讨会。使用语音与计算机交互仍然不是一个自然的过程，其中一个原因是计算机没有完全整合语音的韵律信息（语调和时间）。ToBI标注系统是在美国国家科学基金会的支持下于20世纪90年代开发的，用于标注韵律特征，如重音和措辞，这些特征传达了对语音意义至关重要的信息。从那时起，ToBI约定通过允许大量研究人员使用公共标签共享数据并将这些约定扩展到其他语言，进一步加深了对韵律的理解。这些进步大多来自理论领域；相比之下，自动语音合成、识别和理解系统的应用由于使用ToBI的挑战而放慢了速度。ToBI主要是在脚本语音的基础上开发的，用于标记自然的自发语音，这是现在的研究重点。研讨会将通过以下方式解决这一问题：(i)通过对示例话语的预备在线讨论，确定自发言语的一些关键标签挑战；（ii）围绕这些问题组织研讨会，并将小组对这些问题的解决方案（以及更大的话语样本）纳入在线可获得的修订ToBI手册；（iii）以网站形式提供一个持续的论坛，由西蒙斯学院主持，每月发布具有挑战性的话语，让感兴趣的参与者进行标记，并总结标记结果以供在线讨论。ToBI的扩展，以满足自发语音的挑战，如不流畅，中断和无脚本的对话结构，将扩大已经证明的通用韵律标记系统的好处。能够在实验室之间共享数据意味着在理解说话者如何在交际语言中使用韵律方面取得更快的进展，因为它有助于研究人员制定语调和时间理论，设计实验来测试他们的理论预测，并开发自动处理系统中处理韵律的算法。因此，这个新工具将有可能使使用语音的人机交互更加自然。其他好处还包括更好的自动翻译方法，改进的第二语言教学材料，以及为有语言障碍的人提供更方便的辅助工具。

With National Science Foundation support, Simmons College will host an international workshop August 13-15, 2004, on the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) labeling system. Interacting with computers using speech is still not a natural process, and one of the reasons is that computers do not fully incorporate the prosodic information (intonation and timing) of spoken utterances. The ToBI labeling system was developed with NSF support in the 1990's to label prosodic features, such as emphasis and phrasing, which convey information vital to the meaning of speech. Since that time, the ToBI conventions have furthered the understanding of prosody by allowing a large community of researchers to share data using common labels and to extend these conventions to other languages. Most of these advances have come in theoretical areas; in contrast, applications to automatic speech synthesis, recognition and understanding systems have been slowed by the challenges of using ToBI, which was developed largely on the basis of scripted speech, to label the kind of natural spontaneous speech that is now a research priority. The workshop will address this problem by (i) identifying some of the critical labeling challenges of spontaneous speech, through preparatory on-line discussions of example utterances; (ii) organizing workshop sessions around these issues and incorporating the group's resolution of these issues (as well as a larger sampling of utterances) in a revised ToBI manual, available on-line; and (iii) providing an ongoing forum in the form of a website, hosted at Simmons College, on which challenging utterances are posted monthly for labeling by interested participants, and labeling results are summarized for on-line discussion. The extension of ToBI to meet the challenges of spontaneous speech, such as disfluencies, interruptions and unscripted dialogue structures, will expand the already-demonstrated benefits of a common prosody labeling system. Being able to share data across laboratories means faster progress toward understanding how speakers use prosody in communicative speech, because it helps investigators formulate theories of intonation and timing, design experiments for testing their theoretical predictions, and develop algorithms for dealing with prosody in automatic processing systems. As a result, this new tool will have the potential to make human-computer interactions using speech more natural. Additional benefits will include better methods for automatic translation, improved materials for second language teaching and more user-friendly aids for those with speech-related handicaps.