Rhapsodie
The intention of the Rhapsodie project was to create a prosodic reference corpus of spoken French, sampled from a broad array of discursive styles of speech.
In addition to prosodic annotations, the corpus contains syntactic and informative annotations that can be used to analyze the relationships between syntax and the status of prosody in the speech (e.g. placing of the communicative structure, conducting speaking in turns). The issue of standardization of annotation is therefore central to the project. The complementary objectives of the project’s partners can be found in 7 domains:
- Perfecting formants for the annotation and reading of intonosytactic data to promote interoperability and exchanges.
- Placing resources of spoken French (30 hours of speech) at the disposal of the scientific community. Twenty percent of these resources have been annotated in terms of prosody (following the Text Encoding Initiative transcription guidelines, formant xML).
- Distributing the tools online to process and analyze these resources with comprehensive users’ manuals.
- Developing reasoned and explicit linguistic methods for the interpretation and generation of structures.
- Enriching the intonosyntactical models of spoken French.
- Contributing to the improvement of prosody in speech synthesis.
- Organizing an international colloquium at the end of the project on prosody-speech interfaces to present the project’s results and compare them with work carried out by internationally known research teams.
Project reference: ANR-07-CORP-030-02.
