computational prosody

Unbounded recursion in two dimensions, where syntax and prosody meet

Both syntax and prosody seem to require structures with unbounded branching, something that is not immediately provided by multiple context free grammars or other equivalently expressive formalisms. That extension is easy, and does not disrupt an …

Representing multiple dependencies in prosodic structures

Association of tones to prosodic trees was introduced in Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988). This included: (i) tonal association to higher-level prosodic nodes such as intonational phrases, and (ii) multiple association of a tone to a higher-level …

Computational perspectives on phonological constituency and recursion

Whether or not phonology has recursion is often conflated with whether or not phonology has strings or trees as data structures. Taking a computational perspective from formal language theory and focusing on how phonological strings and trees are …

Parsing with Minimalist Grammars and prosodic trees

Advances in the syntactic parsing of written language have proceeded apace in the last few decades, but much less progress has been made in the syntactic parsing of spoken language. Here, we address one question important for such progress: how can …

Advantages of Constituency: Computational Perspectives on Samoan Word Prosody

In this paper, we computationally implement and compare grammars of Samoan stress patterns that refer to feet and that refer only to syllables in Karttunen’s finite state formalization of Optimality Theory, and in grammars that directly state …

The role of time in phonetic spaces: Temporal resolution in Cantonese tone perception

The role of temporal resolution in speech perception (e.g. whether tones are parameterized with fundamental frequency sampled every 10 ms, or just twice in the syllable) is sometimes overlooked, and the temporal resolution relevant for tonal …

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

While it has long been clear that prosody should be part of the grammar influencing the action of the syntactic parser, how to bring prosody into computational models of syntactic parsing has remained unclear. The challenge is that prosodic …