A framework for labeling speech with acoustic cues to linguistic distinctive features

Shreya Huilgol, Jinwoo Baik, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

Abstract:

Acoustic cues are characteristic patterns in the speech signal
that provide lexical, prosodic, or additional information, such as speaker
identity. In particular, acoustic cues related to linguistic distinctive fea-
tures can be extracted and marked from the speech signal. These acoustic
cues can be used to infer the intended underlying phoneme sequence in
an utterance. This study describes a framework for labeling acoustic cues
in speech, including a suite of canonical cue prediction algorithms
that facilitates manual labeling and provides a standard for analyzing
variations in the surface realizations. A brief examination of subsets of
annotated speech data shows that labeling acoustic cues opens the possi-
bility of detailed analyses of cue modification patterns in speech.