Web Harvest of Minimal Intonational Pairs

This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issues of the phonetics-phonology and semanticspragmatics of intonation. The target data are tokens of fixed word strings like “than I did”, where intonation varies in a way which correlates with grammatical and pragmatic context. In a web harvest procedure, audio files were identified using a search engine based in speech-to-text, downloaded, and cut to a relevant segment under program control. In an application of such a database, an SVM classifier was trained to make a grammatically determined distinction in intonation based on purely acoustic cues. Sources of error in the retrieval are quantified.