Patent ID: 7962341

Claim:
An apparatus for the prosodic labelling of speech comprising: a computer programmed to execute plural programmed units, including: a receiving unit configured to receive an audio file and a text file corresponding to the audio file; a first analysis unit configured to analyze the audio file as a plurality of frames positioned at fixed time intervals in said audio file, said first analysis unit extracting features for each frame from said audio file to form a feature vector for each frame and scoring said features to determine a score for a plurality of prosodic labels for each frame; and a second analysis unit configured to analyze said audio file using results of said first analysis unit, said second analysis unit being configured to (a) determine positions of a plurality of analysis windows, each analysis window comprising a plurality of frames, based on segmental information obtained from the audio file and a text file corresponding to the audio file, (b) select a feature vector within each analysis window on the basis of the scores determined by the first analysis unit, (c) extract further features from the audio file for each analysis window and combining with said feature vector to construct a segment feature vector for each said analysis window, (d) score features of said segment feature vector for each analysis vector to determine a score for a plurality of prosodic labels, and (e) select a prosodic label with the highest score for each analysis window.