Pitch accent prediction: effects of genre and speaker

To build a robust pitch accent prediction system, we need to understand the effects of speech genre and speaker variation. This paper reports our studies on genre and speaker variation in pitch accent placement and their effects on automatic pitch accent prediction. We find some interesting accentuation pattern differences that can be attributed to speech genre, and a set of textual features that are robust to genre in accent prediction. We also find that although there is significant variation among speakers in pitch accent placement, speaker dependent models are not needed in accent prediction. Finally, we show that after taking speaker variation into account, there is little room to improve for state-of-the-art classifiers on read news speech.