Speech Rate Calculations with Short Utterances: A Study from a Speech-to-Speech, Machine Translation Mediated Map Task

Abstract

The motivation for this paper is to present a way to verify if an utterance within a corpus is pronounced at a fast or slow pace. An alternative method to the well-known Word-Per-Minute (wpm) method for cases where this approach is not applicable. For long segmentations, such as the full introduction section of a speech or presentation, the measurement of wpm is a viable option. For short comparisons of the same single word or multiple syllables, Syllables-Per-Second (sps) is also a viable option. However, when there are multiple short utterances that are frequent in task oriented dialogues or natural free flowing conversation, such as those of the direct Human-to-Human dialogues of the HCRC Map Task corpus or the computer mediated inter-lingual dialogues of the ILMT-s2s corpus, it becomes difficult to obtain a meaningful value for the utterance speech rate. In this paper we explain the method used to provide a alternative speech rate value to the utterance of the ILMT-s2s corpus and the HCRC Map Task corpus.

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