• name: Phonetic Transcription

• coding purpose: segmentation of speech into phonetically labeled segments (SAMPA scheme)

• coding level: Prosody

• data sources: spoken corpora (speech files, orthographic transcription)

• module references: orthographic transcription module (optional)

• description: The level defines a base element, the <phone> element, corresponding to a segment in the speech signal, labeled according to its phonetic features. A <syllable> element may be added, consisting of a sequence of <phones>. The annotation at this level is a transcription and a segmentation, in the sense that it refers directly to the speech signal, recognizes the uttered sounds and splits the speech continuum into phonetic chunks. Each <phone> will then be classified with a phonetic label and associated with time information specifying its start and end instants. Higher linguistic levels, like the phonological prosodic levels or the orthographic word level, might inherit time information from the phonetic level by linking their elements with <phone> elements or <syllable> elements.

The scheme adopted here for phonetic transcription is SAMPA [Wells et al., 1992], which is intended for multi-lingual phonetic transcription. In the original SAMPA notation, a transcription is a stream of phonetic labels and diacritics, where labels classify phones and diacritics give further specifications about phones, with the exception of stress marks which implicitly refer to the following syllable. In our adaptation, the <syllable> element is made explicit as a second layer built on top of the <phone> layer.

• example: The following example shows the phonetic transcription of the Spanish word 'casa' ('house') and its corresponding syllabic segmentation, using the <phone> and <syllable> elements:

phone.xml

<phone id="phn_01" type="k" start="345" end="390"/>

syllable.xml

<syllable id="sllbl_01" stress="&quot" href="phone.xml# id(phn_001)..id(phn_002)"/>

• markup declaration:

* The attribute `type', although defined as ASCII data, can only contain an allowable (language-dependent) combination of SAMPA symbols and diacritics.
 
 

ELEMENT <syllable>
ATTRIBUTES:
id [ASCII]
stress &quot, %
start [FLOAT]
end [FLOAT]
 

• coding procedure:
• Manual phonetic segmentation:
• select the speech file and open the synchronized windows for phonetic segmentation and waveform and spectrum display
• zoom until a detailed inspection of the signal is possible
• inspect and listen to the signal portion until the uttered phonemes are recognized
• select a phonetic label for the first phone
• identify its boundaries according to the segmentation criteria and mark them by placing the cursor on the proper point on the time-axis (this should automatically set the time attribute)
• after phonetic segmentation is concluded, define syllables by selecting their component <phone>'s and, if stressed, by assigning the proper stress mark
• Automatic segmentation:
• listen to the speech sound and transcribe it as a sequence of phones
• apply the phonetic aligner to the speech signal with its phonetic transcription and obtain its phonetic segmentation
• import the phonetic segmentation in the MATE environment
• define syllables as in step 6 above.

• creation notes:
• Authors: Silvia Quazza, Juan María Garrido
• Version: 1., October 1999
• Comments: none
• Literature: