Automatic detection of prominence (as defined by listeners' judgements) in read aloud Dutch sentences

This paper describes a first step towards the automatic classification of prominence (as defined by native listeners). As a result of a listening experiment each word in 500 sentences was marked with a rating scale between `0' (non-prominent) and `10' (very prominent). These prominence labels are compared with the following acoustical features: loudness of each vowel, and F0 range and duration of each syllable. A linear relationship between the rating scale of prominence and these acoustical features is found. These acoustical features then are used for a preliminary automatic classification to predict prominence.