PESInet: Automatic Recognition of Italian Statements, Questions, and Exclamations With Neural Networks

PESInet is an Automatic Prosody Recognition system aiming at classifying Infor- mation Units as Statement, Question or Exclamation. PESInet adopts a modular architecture, with a master NN evaluating the results of two independent BLSTM NNs that work on audio and its transcription. PESInet has been trained with our own three-class, balanced corpus composed of about 1.5 million text phrases and 60 000 utterances of recited and spontaneous speech. PESInet reached an accuracy of 80% on three classes, and 91% on two classes (Question vs Non-question). Finally PESInet, compared against human listeners on a two-class test based on a dif- ferent corpus, reached a better Accuracy (89% for PESInet, against 80% for human listeners).