Prosodic breaks on Malay speech corpus: Evaluation of pitch, intensity and duration

Prosodic phrasing is useful to segment lengthy spontaneous speech into smaller meaningful utterance without analysis of linguistic information. A simpler approach is presented to identify and classify the boundaries in prosodic phrasing using pitch and intensity patterns and pause duration on Malay speech sentences. We also propose a listening test that allows trained listener to classify the boundaries as minor or major breaks. This cheaper and faster approach is proven useful for under-resource language such as Malay which do not have comprehensive prosodic-annotated corpus. Word-related pitch, intensity and duration features are extracted from the targeted sentence and phrase breaks. A speech corpus is developed from targeted breaks of 100 speech sentences evaluated in the listening test. Instead of labeling the phrase break using linguistic and phonetic meaning, the proposed listening test allows labeling of phrase break as perceived by listener. In addition, the results can be used as preliminary information for evaluation of boundary saliency at the targeted boundary locations.