EE Seminar: Prosodic Feature Criterion
Speaker: Ben Fishman
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Hagit Messer-Yaron and Dr. Irit Opher
Wednesday, November 28th, 2018 at 15:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Prosodic Feature Criterion
Abstract
Prosody can be defined as the non-contextual information conveyed in speech utterances. Prosodic cues provide valuable information for human communication as prosody is used to express emotional states, attitudes and intentions. It carries clues regarding dialogue turns, phrase emphasis and even the physiological state of the speaker. Prosody has been researched extensively by linguists and speech scientists; However, little attention has been given to formulating and ranking the acoustic features that represent prosodic information.
In this work we present the Prosodic Feature Criterion (PFC) for evaluating the prosodic nature of a feature that was extracted from a speech signal. Using the PFC score we can rank the features, compare them and determine whether an acoustic or spectral feature carries prosodic information.
We explore the PFC using many kinds of features including ~4,300 features out of the OpenSMILE toolkit, which is a standard set of features widely used for acoustic analysis and prosody research. We use a few datasets in different languages; the main dataset is in Hebrew and was especially designed for research prosodic features. We apply our methodology successfully and find that prosodic features indeed are independent of the content of the utterance, while depend on prosodic manifestations.
We validate our methodology using several methods: showing that our ranking of prosodic features yields similar results to classification-based feature selection, showing visualization of the PFC idea using dimension reduction of multiple features representation, and comparing the PFC results to standard features, some of them are considered to be prosodic and some are not.
