IVie - a comparative transcription system for intonational variation in English

In this paper, we offer an alternative to ToBI, the current de facto standard for machine-readable labelling of English prosody. We have three reasons for arguing that an alternative is needed. Firstly, the ToBI tone inventory is not maximally constrained. Inter-transcriber agreement for tone labels is relatively low and F0 contours generated from ToBI labels seem to be no closer to the original than those derived from a model which does not distinguish between accent shapes. Secondly, the growing demand for prosodically labelled data from non-standard varieties of English suggests a need for a transparent comparative transcription system. ToBI was not designed for this purpose. Thirdly, the low inter-transcriber agreement scores for ToBI suggest that the system is not as easy to apply as it may at first appear. In the present paper, we describe an alternative: the IViE system (Intonational Variation in English). We describe the structure of IViE and discuss its application with examples.