Evaluating the Use of Prosodic Information in Speech Recognition and Understanding

The goal of this project is to investigate the use of different levels of prosodic information in speech recognition and understanding. In particular, the current focus of the work is the use of prosodic phrase boundary information in parsing. The research involves determining a representation of prosodic information suitable for use in a speech understanding system, developing reliable algorithms for detection of the prosodic cues in speech, investigating architectures for integrating prosodic cues in a parser, and evaluating the potential improvements of prosody in the context of the SRI Spoken Language System. This research is sponsored jointly by DARPA and NSF.