An intonosyntactic treebank for spoken F rench: What is new with Rhapsodie? (2025)

Abstract: This paper presents a new format of the Rhapsodie Treebank, which contains both syntactic and prosodic annotations, offering a comprehensive dataset for the study of spoken French.This integrated format allow us for complex multilevel queries and open the way for the extraction of intonosyntactic studies.

## introduction the rhapsodie treebank is the outcome of the french national research agency (anr) project rhapsodie, which began in 2008. it is the fruit of years of work by a group of french researchers who collected 3 hours and 10 minutes of spoken french audio, transcribed it, analyzed it, and developed a multi-level annotation scheme (wich involves syntax and prosody) that is reproducible and allows for the study of the syntax-prosody interface in french @xcite . the main interest of this corpus, in addition to its multilevel annotation, lies in the richness of its metadata. it is composed of 30 monologues and 27 dialogues produced with different communicative goals, which may belong to public or private social contexts and can be spontaneous, semispontaneous, or planned, with varying degrees of interactivity. in this paper, we propose to implement and expand upon the methodology introduced in @xcite for naija, or nigerian pidgin, to provide a new version of the rhapsodie treebank where the different annotation layers (morphosyntax and prosody) are represented in a unified structure. the main benefit is that this version allows for a more in-depth study of the interaction between syntax and prosody. this is illustrated in the paper cited above on naija. ## combining syntax and prosody in one single format in 2024, the intonosyntactic treebank for the naija @xcite introduced for the first time a format in which every node annotated with syntactic information, (i. e., each token), is associated with child nodes corresponding to its constituent syllables, which are annotated with automatically extracted prosodic information. since the rhapsodie project had already been manually annotated at both the syntactic and prosodic levels years earlier, this development represented a valuable opportunity to adapt the original rhapsodie corpus to the new format, while preserving the original manual annotations and incorporating new ones. the main difference between the rhapsodie intonosyntactic treebank and the naija intonosyntactic treebank is the presence of micro-and macrosyntactic annotations and extra prosodic annotations at the token level and not just at the syllable level, like the token's position within an intonative period, metrical foot, rhythmic group or an intonational package, that will be explained later. the inclusion of prosodic information altered the structure of the dependency tree, as two tokens may share the same syllable (fused syllable). their corresponding subtokens are therefore connected accordingly, as shown in figure 1 . the corpus update involved the integration of syntactic and prosodic information into a single unified conll-u format to facilitate its use. the original rhapsodie treebank is composed of approximately 33,000 tokens, for which the multi-level annotations were distributed in various formats. 1 these included wav/mp3 files for the audio, txt files for the transcription, tabular formats for microand macro-syntactic annotations, pitch format for acoustic analysis, and xml, textgrid, and tabular formats for prosodic annotations. metadata was ## use of this resource the updated corpus is still undergoing refinement, but it is already available on grew-match. 4 for most samples in the corpus, users can visualize a dependency tree enriched with 41 new features, with full access to metadata. in cases where only part of the audio was analyzed due to overlap, these instances are marked with the "overlap" feature, and the number of annotations is accordingly reduced. the complete list of the new features foot_4 added to the corpus is provided in the appendix. 6 in grew-match, numerous queries are possible. an example foot_6 in the syntax-prosody domain shows that when a token is the last element of a prenucleus (x.@xmath0, it tends to exhibit strong final prominence (x.@xmath1.10% of cases, as shown in figure 5 . in contrast, when the token is the first element of a prenucleus (x.@xmath2, strong prominence occurs in only 23.20% of cases. grew-match also allows querying the newly extracted features, which contain numerical values. for example, this query foot_8 aims to investigate the correlation between part of speech (x-[@xmath3; x[@xmath4.duration). (see figure 6 ). we observed that the final syllables of pronouns are the shortest in 75.63% of the cases, followed by verbs at 61.96%, and nouns at 42.23%. in other words, the final syllables of nouns tend to be longer compared to those of verbs and pronouns. this enriched format facilitates its use in various tasks related to the syntax-prosody interface, and also opens possibilities for sociolinguistic research, even though the original version of rhapsodie was not initially designed for this purpose. for instance, the results of a query foot_9 designed to determine the percentage of ipe boundaries (x.@xmath5.@xmath6, according to the social context of the sample, show that the professional social context exhibits the highest alignment between the end of an iu and the end of an ipe (68.56%), followed by the public context at 56.09%. the private context displays the lowest alignment, at 49.30%. (see figure 7 ) ## conclusion in this paper, we discussed the process involved in updating the rhapsodie corpus, which now forms the most feature-rich intonosyntactic treebank available (with the treebank of naija, @xcite ). it includes manual, automatic, and semi-automatic annotations, a rare achievement in current research. in the future, we believe this corpus could extend beyond the study of the syntax-prosody interface. considering that the audio files are available, along with the information provided in the treebank, tasks such as speech modeling or classification in the prosody-syntaxsociolinguistics interface could be explored.