AutoProsody: A Prosodic Feature Extraction Tool for Indian Languages

TL;DR

AutoProsody is a tool designed to automatically extract prosodic features from speech signals in Indian languages, facilitating easier analysis for various applications by providing detailed, time-aligned annotations.

Contribution

It introduces SIToBI, a novel tool that automates prosodic annotation for Indian languages, focusing on syllable-level features and demonstrating high accuracy compared to manual methods.

Findings

High accuracy in prosodic annotation compared to manual annotations

Effective for Tamil, Hindi, and Indian English

Easily extendable to other Indian and syllable-timed languages

Abstract

The availability of prosodic information from speech signals is useful in a wide range of applications. However, deriving this information from speech signals can be a laborious task involving manual intervention. Therefore, the current work focuses on developing a tool that can provide prosodic annotations corresponding to a given speech signal, particularly for Indian languages. The proposed Segmentation with Intensity, Tones and Break Indices (SIToBI) tool provides time-aligned phoneme, syllable, and word transcriptions, syllable-level pitch contour annotations, break indices, and syllable-level relative intensity indices. The tool focuses more on syllable-level annotations since Indian languages are syllable-timed. Indians, regardless of the language they speak, may exhibit influences from other languages. As a result, other languages spoken in India may also exhibit syllable-timed characteristics. The accuracy of the annotations derived from the tool is analyzed by comparing them against manual annotations and the tool is observed to perform well. While the current work focuses on three languages, namely, Tamil, Hindi, and Indian English, the tool can easily be extended to other Indian languages and possibly other syllable-timed languages as well.