Paragraphs are composed of sentences. Hence when a paragraph begins, a sentence must begin, and as a paragraph closes, some sentence must finish. This observation is the basis of the sentence boundary detection method proposed by Riley (1989). Similarly, sentences consist of words. As a sentence begins or ends there must be word boundaries. Inspired by this notion, we invent a method to learn a...

0. Introduction This study examines the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence as perceived by a large number of native listeners of American English who are naïve to the phonetics and phonology of prosody. In English, as in other stress languages, speech utterances are chunked into smaller prosodic phrases, and within a prosodic phrase some words are assigned phrasal stress, which typicall...

Subjects are preferred antecedents for pronominal reference (Mathews and Chodorow, 1988; Hudson-D’Zmura and Tanenhaus, 1997). Many pronoun resolution algorithms account for this by assuming a hierarchy of syntactic prominence with SUBJECTS > OBJECTS. However, for many verbs in English, syntactic role is conflated with semantic role: That is, syntactic SUBJECTS are often semantic AGENTS and so o...

Two experiments explored discourse and communicative factors that contribute to the perceived prominence of a word in an utterance, and how that prominence is realized acoustically. In Experiment 1 two hypotheses were tested: (1) acoustic prominence is a product of the given-new status of a word and (2) acoustic prominence depends on the degree to which a referent is accessible, where greater a...

Recent work has suggested that prominence perception could be driven by the predictability of the acoustic prosodic features of speech. On the other hand, lexical predictability and part of speech information are also known to correlate with prominence. In this paper, we investigate how the bottom-up acoustic and top-down lexical cues contribute to sentence prominence by using both types of fea...