Towards Automatic Recognition of Prosody

The term prosody defines the group of audio paralinguistic and suprasegmental cues involved in the communicative and under- standing process of human speech. This paper presents our approach to automatic recognition of prosodic forms. In par- ticular, we present: CALLIOPE, a multi-dimensional and ab- stract model, aiming at categorising all prosodic forms; SI- CALLIOPE, a sub-space for which we defined a corpus of recorder prosodic forms; and the psychoacoustic experiment we are currently carrying on for investigating main acous- tic behaviours and features involved into the discrimination of prosodic forms. The experiment results will be useful for defining the feature set to rely on for automatic recognition of prosodies. For that reason, we are also defining a classifier, based on Neural Nets. This study is part of the LYV project, which focuses on improving prosodic expressiveness skills of Italian speakers with autism and other cognitive disabilities.