Linking bottom-up intonation stylization to discourse structure

A new approach for intonation stylization is introduced, that enables the extraction of an intonation representation from prosodically unlabeled data. This approach yields global and local intonation contour classes arising from a contour-based, parametric and superpositional intonation stylization. Based on findings about the linguistic interpretation of the contour classes derived from corpus statistics and perception experiments, we created simple prediction models for the partial generation of intonation contours from discourse structure defined by discourse segment boundaries and the information status of nouns within these segments. The predicted intonation contours were evaluated by human judgments of adequacy that yielded a high accordance.