Summary of the paper

Title Word Boundaries in French: Evidence from Large Speech Corpora
Authors Rena Nemoto, Martine Adda-Decker and Jacques Durand
Abstract The goal of this paper is to investigate French word segmentation strategies using phonemic and lexical transcriptions as well as prosodic and part-of-speech annotations. Average fundamental frequency (f0) profiles and phoneme duration profiles are measured using 13 hours of broadcast news speech to study prosodic regularities of French words. Some influential factors are taken into consideration for f0 and duration measurements: word syllable length, word-final schwa, part-of-speech. Results from average f0 profiles confirm word final syllable accentuation and from average duration profiles, we can observe long word final syllable length. Both are common tendencies in French. From noun phrase studies, results of average f0 profiles illustrate higher noun first syllable after determiner. Inter-vocalic duration profile results show long inter-vocalic duration between determiner vowel and preceding word vowel. These results reveal measurable cues contributing to word boundary location. Further studies will include more detailed within syllable f0 patterns, other speaking styles and languages.
Topics Prosody, Speech resource/database, Knowledge Discovery/Representation
Full paper Word Boundaries in French: Evidence from Large Speech Corpora
Slides Word Boundaries in French: Evidence from Large Speech Corpora
Bibtex @InProceedings{NEMOTO10.386,
  author = {Rena Nemoto and Martine Adda-Decker and Jacques Durand},
  title = {Word Boundaries in French: Evidence from Large Speech Corpora},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  month = {may},
  date = {19-21},
  address = {Valletta, Malta},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Mike Rosner and Daniel Tapias},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {2-9517408-6-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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