Lexical Emphasis Detection in Spoken French using F-BANKs and neural networks

Abstract

Expressiveness and non-verbal information in speech are active research topics in speech processing. In this work, we are interested in detecting emphasis at word-level as a mean to identify what are the focus words in a given utterance. We compare several machine learning techniques (Linear Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks) for this task carried out on SIWIS, a French speech synthesis database. Our approach consists first in aligning the spoken words to the speech signal and second to feed classifier with filter bank coefficients in order to take a binary decision at word-level: neutral/emphasized. Evaluation results show that a three-layer neural network performed best with a 93% accuracy.