1、10/14/2018,1,Studying Intonation,Julia Hirschberg CS 4706,10/14/2018,2,Today,Approaches to studying contour meaning Questions people ask Does contour X convey a different meaning from contour Y? Is contour X used more often in context Z than contour Y Despite what people say/think, not all phenomena
2、 X are uttered with contour Y What kind of evidence could we get? Found data Laboratory experiments: production, perception Corpus collection,10/14/2018,3,What features can we look at and how do we obtain them? Intonation labeling by hand Acoustic/prosodic analysis by automatic methods Pitch trackin
3、g, pause detection, intensity, duration, speaking rate extraction Computational linguistic techniques to extract transcript-based (text) features Part-of-speech Sentence length, What techniques do we use for analysis? Statistical methods (Splus, Matlab) Machine learning techniques,10/14/2018,4,Some
4、Sample Approaches,Natural Corpus: Hedberg & Sosa 2002 Introspective, observational: Wilson 1993, Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990/2 Laboratory - Production/Perception: Syrdal & Jilka 2004 Laboratory Brain Imaging (e.g. fMRI): Doherty et al,10/14/2018,5,A Prescriptive Approach: Wilson 1993,Declarative
5、 statements fall and yes-no-questions rise? Wh-questions fall? Small final rise signals more to come?,10/14/2018,6,Corpus Studies of Questions: Hedberg & Sosa 2002,How are yes-no and wh-questions uttered and how might we explain differences? Where is the nuclear stress? Where is the semantic focus?
6、What is the topic? Are the wh words accented or not? Corpus: 73 questions Who saw John?/Who didnt see John? Did John leave?/Didnt John leave? 35 whqs and 38 ynqs from the McLaughlin Group and Washington Week,10/14/2018,7,Analysis Intonational labeling (ToBI) from pitch tracks Topic/focus coding Freq
7、uency distributions of features with question categories Prosody of locus of interrogation Wh word in wh-questions Fronted auxiliary in yes-no questions Results Ynqs generally uttered w/ falling or level intonation, not rising (69%) Wh-qs most often uttered with falling (80%),10/14/2018,8,Wh-words (
8、60%) in all wh-questions and neg aux in negative ynqs (89%) most often uttered with L+H* accent (contrastive accent) - why? Aux in positive ynqs often deaccented (41%) or realized with L* (17%) accent why? Conclusions/open questions: Why do ynqs and wh-qs sometimes rise and sometimes fall? Locus of
9、interrogation is accented in wh-qs and in negative ynqs to “signal interrogative status of sentence” but not in positive ynqs “due to need to highlight a following element”,10/14/2018,9,Critique,Is this a good corpus for this investigation? Size Genre What about the speakers?,10/14/2018,10,Syrdal &
10、Jilka 2004,How are whqs and ynqs produced most naturally (for TTS)? Same initial hypothesis: whqs fall and ynqs rise in American English Different approach: production and perception studies Production: 8 (professional) speakers (5F, 3M) Read transcripts of actual dialogues,10/14/2018,11,Analysis: I
11、ntonational (ToBI) labeling from pitch tracks of extracted questions Results: Ynqs rose in 83% of cases for females and 53% for males Wh-qs always fell for females and fell 79% of time for male speakers; wh-qs and statements generally fell Nuclear accents in ynqs: majority L*,10/14/2018,12,Perceptio
12、n studies: acceptability judgments Forced choice, 12 listeners Stimuli: Pairs of ynq and whqs with same voice/different intonation 17 natural (9 ynqs, 8 whqs) 12 synthesized 12 subjects (6 and 6) Judgments: Ynq: Natural speech: people preferred standard rise (L* H- H%) Synthetic speech: no results W
13、hq: Natural speech: people preferred falling contours (L- L%) to rising (H-H%) and slightly to continuation rise (L- H%) Synthetic: no preference,10/14/2018,13,Critique,How many questions were produced? Are professional speakers a good choice? Read vs. spontaneous speech? For TTS? Why no results for
14、 synthetic speech? Comparison to Hedberg and Sosa,10/14/2018,14,Doherty et al 2004,How do people process intonation, e.g., in rising questions vs. falling statements vs. falling questions? She was talking to her father? She was talking to her father. Was she talking to her father. Research questions
15、: Where is the prosody portion of the brain? What other sectors is it close to and what is their function? Do particular contours have particular locations?,10/14/2018,15,Method: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of subjects presented with digitized recordings 11 subjects (4M, 7F) Note ex
16、perimental condition! 150 triples, of which each subjects heard only 1 version She was talking to her father? Was she talking to her father. She was talking to her father. Monitoring task: Is this a question or a statement? Press one key for question, another for statement,10/14/2018,16,Results: Inc
17、rease in activation when subjects made judgments about tokens w/ rising intonation - but not falling, whether syntactic question or syntactic statement Why? Semantic processing? No illocutionary force is same in rising and falling questions Acoustic processing? Maybe Interpreting the rising contour as a question? Check lesion studies to see if people with damage in these areas can interpret rising contours,10/14/2018,17,Critique,No rising inverted questions? “Was she talking to her father?”,10/14/2018,18,Next Class,How do we represent intonational variation?,
