Assigning stress to words in a sentence

[Gonzalo V]

How do Festival and the lexicon ‘know’ how to assign the stress levels in a sentence without being aware of where the verb is, what is an adjective to the noun, etc.?

[Simon]

Think about the order of processes in the front end pipeline. You’ll see that Part Of Speech (POS) tagging is done before predicting intonation. We can describe POS as very shallow (i.e., without deep structure) syntactic information.

So, although we do not explicitly know the relationships between words, we do have some information about their role in the sentence, in the form of the sequence of POS tags for the words.

The sequence of POS tags is one of the main predictors for intonation. For example, if we wanted to use a CART to predict whether a particular word in a sentence should receive a pitch accent, then the POS of that word and the POS of the surrounding words would be good predictors.

See the last two videos in Module 4 of Speech Processing – Prosody prediction 1, and Prosody prediction 2.

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