Prosomarker: a prosodic analysis tool based on optimal pitch stylization and automatic syllabification

Prosodic research in recent years has been supported by a number of automatic analysis tools aimed at simplifying the work that is requested to study intonation. The need to analyze large amounts of data and to inspect phenomena that are often ambiguous and difficult to model makes the prosodic research area an ideal application field for computer based processing. One of the main challenges in this field is to model the complex relations occurring between the segmental level, mainly in terms of syllable nuclei and boundaries, and the supra-segmental level, mainly in terms of tonal movements. The goal of our contribution is to provide a tool for automatic annotation of prosodic data, the Prosomarker, designed to give a visual representation of both segmental and suprasegmental events. The representation is intended to be as generic as possible to let researchers analyze specific phenomena without being limited by assumptions introduced by the annotation itself. A perceptual account of the pitch curve is provided along with an automatic segmentation of the speech signal into syllable-like segments and the tool can be used both for data exploration, in semi-automatic mode, and to process large sets of data, in automatic mode.