Intonational and Its Meanings
Julia Hirschberg
CS 6998
7/15/2016
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Today
ToBI intonational framework
Spoken language and interpretations
Phrasing
Accent
Contours
Pitch Range
Amplitude and timing
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To(nes and)B(reak)I(ndices)
Developed by prosody researchers in four
meetings over 1991-94
Goals:
devise common labeling scheme for
Standard American English that is robust
and reliable
promote collection of large, prosodically
labeled, shareable corpora
ToBI standards also proposed for Japanese,
German, Italian, Spanish, British and
Australian English,....
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Minimal ToBI transcription:
recording of speech
f0 contour
ToBI tiers:
orthographic tier: words
break-index tier: degrees of junction (Price et
al ‘89)
tonal tier: pitch accents, phrase accents,
boundary tones (Pierrehumbert ‘80)
miscellaneous tier: disfluencies, non-speech
sounds, etc.
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Sample ToBI Labeling
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 Online training material,available at:
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/phonetics/ToBI/
 Evaluation
Good inter-labeler reliability for expert and naive
labelers: 88% agreement on presence/absence
of tonal category, 81% agreement on category
label, 91% agreement on break indices to within
1 level (Silverman et al. ‘92,Pitrelli et al ‘94)
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Pitch Accent/Prominence in ToBI
 Which items are made intonationally prominent and
how?
 Accent type:
H*
L*
L*+H
L+H*
simple high (declarative)
simple low (ynq)
scooped, late rise (uncertainty/ incredulity)
early rise to stress (contrastive focus)
H+!H* fall onto stress (implied familiarity)
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•Downstepped accents:
•!H*,
•L+!H*,
•L*+!H
•Degree of prominence:
within a phrase: HiF0
across phrases
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Functions of Pitch Accent
 Given/new information
S: Do you need a return ticket.
U: No, thanks, I don’t need a return.
 Contrast (narrow focus)
U: No, thanks, I don’t need a RETURN…. (I need
a time schedule, receipt,…)
 Disambiguation of discourse markers
S: Now let me get you the train information.
U: Okay (thanks) vs. Okay….(but I really want…)
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Prosodic Phrasing in ToBI
 ‘Levels’ of phrasing:
intermediate phrase: one or more pitch accents
plus a phrase accent (Hor L)
intonational phrase: 1 or more intermediate
phrases + boundary tone (H%
or L%
)
 ToBI break-index tier
0 no word boundary
1
word boundary
2
3
4
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strong juncture with no tonal markings
intermediate phrase boundary
intonational phrase boundary
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Functions of Phrasing
 Disambiguates syntactic constructions, e.g. PP
attachment:
S: You should buy the ticket with the discount
coupon.
 Disambiguates scope ambiguities, e.g. Negation:
S: You aren’t booked through Rome because of
the fare.
 Or modifier scope:
S: This fare is restricted to retired politicians and
civil servants.
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L-L%
L-H%
H-L%
H-H%
H*
L*
L*+H
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L-L%
L-H%
H-L%
H-H%
L+H*
H+!H*
H* !H*
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Contour Examples
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/cs6998/card
s/examples.html
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Contours: Accent +
Phrasing
 What do intonational contours ‘mean’ (Ladd ‘80,
Bolinger ‘89)?
Speech acts (statements, questions, requests)
S: That’ll be credit card? (L* H- H%)
Propositional attitude (uncertainty, incredulity)
S: You’d like an evening flight. (L*+H L- H%)
Speaker affect (anger, happiness, love)
U: I said four SEVEN one! (L+H* L- L%)
“Personality”
S: Welcome to the Sunshine Travel System.
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Propositional attitude (uncertainty)
Did you feed the animals?
I fed the L*+H goldfish L-H%
Distinguish direct/indirect speech acts
Can you open the door?
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But these approaches are limited….
Don’t capture generalizations across similar
tunes
Aren’t predictive/explanatory: why does this
contour convey what it does?
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And Other Things Contribute:
Pitch Range and Timing (Rate, Pause)
Level of speaker engagement
Hello vs. HELLO
 Contour interpretation
Rise/fall/rise (L*+H L-H%): Elephantiasis isn’t
incurable
 Discourse/topic structure: paratones
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How Do We Study Meaning?
Lab experiments
Corpus-based studies
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Next: Some NLP Applications
Read Ch. 19 on Spoken Dialogue Systems
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