Prediction of Non-Linguistic Information of Spontaneous Speech from the Prosodic Annotation: Evaluation of the X-JToBI system

Speakers’ gender and age-group were predicted using the symbolic information of the X-JToBI prosodic labelling scheme as applied to the Core of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (44 hours, 155 speakers, 201 talks). The correct prediction rate of speaker gender by means of logistic regression analysis was about 80%, and, the correct discrimination rate of speaker age-group (4 groups) by means of linear discriminant analysis was about 50 %. These results, in conjunction with the previously reported result of the prediction experiment of 4 speech registers from the X-JToBI information, shows convincingly the superiority of X-JToBI over the traditional J_ToBI. Clarification of the mechanism by which genderand/or age-group information were reflected in the symbolic representations of prosody largely remains as open question, although some preliminary analyses were presented in the current paper.