Prominence in Conversational Speech: Pitch Accent, Contrast and Givenness

Explore the intricacies of prominence patterns in conversational speech through this informative lecture by Ani Nenkova from the University of Pennsylvania. Delve into the importance of pitch accent, contrast, and givenness in improving the naturalness of text-to-speech synthesis systems. Examine results from a large human preference experiment demonstrating how simple models of pitch accent and contrast/focus lead to significant improvements in concatenative synthesis. Analyze a study of prominence in conversational speech based on the Switchboard corpus, which has been annotated for binary pitch accent information and semantically motivated distinctions. Gain insights into the factors involved in prominence assignment and their impact on speech synthesis. Learn about Ani Nenkova's background in computer and information science, including her work on multi-document summarization of news at Columbia University and her postdoctoral research with Dan Jurafsky at Stanford University.