Prosodic Event Annotation and Detection in Three Varieties of English

说英语的人经常毫不费力地使用韵律，如重音和短语，以超越单个单词的意思进行交流。然而，我们对韵律的理解，以及它在语音技术中的整合，都落后了，特别是对于已经被低估的语言变体。尽管数以百万计的美国人说非洲裔美国人英语(AAE)或拉丁裔美国人英语(LE)，但这些语言变体在基础和应用研究中的代表性仍然很低，对言语治疗、教育、刑事司法和就业产生了负面影响。这项研究将产生一个语料库，其中包括AAE、LE和欧美英语的韵律标注语料库，这些语料库将用于提高我们对韵律的科学理解，并创建用于自动检测重音和短语边界的工具。一个由7名来自不同背景的学生组成的团队将接受培训，这将为他们在语言和技术领域的职业生涯提供一条途径。语料库将包括一对说相同方言的人，他们被记录在一项地图任务中，这是一种用来诱导自发、自然的演讲的方法。数据将使用自动语音识别和手写纠正进行转录，并使用强制对齐软件自动分割为单词和单独的声音。训练有素和未经训练的编码员都将使用快速韵律转录来注释句子重音和边界的数据，这是一种为非专家快速、直观的韵律注释而设计的既定方法。声学信息，包括持续时间、音调和强度，将被提取并与注释一起使用，以训练机器学习检测模型，并测试先前关于三种英语变体中口音和边界的频率、分布、声学和感知的发现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

English speakers constantly and effortlessly use prosody, such as accent and phrasing, to communicate beyond the meaning of individual words. Yet our understanding of prosody, and its integration in speech technologies, have lagged behind, particularly so for language varieties that are already underrepresented. While millions of Americans speak African American English (AAE) or Latinx English (LE), these language varieties remain underrepresented in basic and applied research, with negative consequences for speech therapy, education, criminal justice, and employment. This research will result in a corpus of AAE, LE and European American English speech data annotated for prosody, which will be used to improve our scientific understanding of prosody and to create tools for automatic detection of accent and phrase boundaries. A team of 7 students from diverse backgrounds will receive training that will provide a gateway to careers in language and technology.The corpus will include pairs of same-dialect speakers recorded in a map task, a method used to elicit spontaneous, naturalistic speech. The data will be transcribed using automatic speech recognition and hand correction, and automatically segmented into words and individual sounds using forced alignment software. Both trained and untrained coders will annotate the data for sentence accent and boundary using Rapid Prosody Transcription, an established method designed for fast, intuitive prosodic annotation by non-experts. Acoustic information, including duration, pitch, and intensity, will be extracted and used with the annotations to train a machine learning detection model, and to test previous findings about the frequency, distribution, acoustics and perception of accent and boundary in the three English language varieties.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.