Deep Learning for Prominence Detection In Children’s Read Speech

The detection of perceived prominence in speech has attracted approaches ranging from the design of knowledge-based linguistic and acoustic features to the automatic feature learning from suprasegmental attributes such as pitch and intensity contours. We present here, in contrast, a system that operates directly on segmented speech waveforms to learn features relevant to prominent word detection for children’s oral fluency assessment. The chosen CRNN (convolutional recurrent neural network) framework, incorporating both word-level features and sequence information, is found to benefit from the perceptually motivated SincNet filters as the first convolutional layer. We further explore the benefits of the linguistic association between the prosodic events of phrase boundary and prominence with different multi-task architectures. Surpassing the previously reported performance on the same dataset of a random forest ensemble predictor trained on carefully chosen hand-crafted acoustic features, we evaluate further the possibly complementary information from hand-crafted acoustic and pre-trained lexical features.