Progmatica: A Prosodic Database for European Portuguese

Abstract

In this work, a spontaneous speech corpus of broadcasted television material in European Portuguese (EP) is presented. We decided to name it ProGmatica as it is meant to combine prosody information under a pragmatic framework. Our purpose is to analyse, describe and predict the prosodic patterns that are involved in speech acts and discourse events. It is also our goal to relate both prosody and pragmatics to emotion, style and attitude. In future developments, we intend, by this way, to provide EP TTS systems with pragmatic and emotional dimensions. From the whole recorded material we selected, extracted and saved prototypical speech acts with the help of speech analysis tools. We have a multi-speaker corpus, where linguistic, paralinguistic and extra linguistic information are labelled and related to each other. The paper is organized as follows. In section one, a brief state-of-the-art for the available EP corpora containing prosodic information is presented. In section two, we explain the pragmatic criteria used to structure this database. Then, we describe how the speech signal was labelled and which information layers were considered. In section three, we propose a prosodic prediction model to be applied to each speech act in future. In section four, some of the main problems we went through are discussed and future work is presented.

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