Optimizing the automatic functional annotation of English intonation

One of the fundamental aims of prosodic analysis is to provide a reliable means of extracting functional information (what prosody contributes to meaning) directly from prosodic form. It has been argued that an explicit model of the mapping from prosodic function to prosodic form could provide an objective way of approaching this task. In this presentation we look specifically at some of the problems of optimizing this mapping in order to extract the functional information automatically from the formal representation, hence ultimately directly from the acoustic data.