Cat_ToBI
labeling system

The uses of Cat_ToBI

Description
of the system

Prosodic phrasing

Tonal
representation

The uses of Cat_ToBI

Cat_ToBI is being used in order to develop a large and publicly available corpus of annotated utterances. Prosodically annotated corpora are an important language resource for several reasons. Corpora based research can contribute to the better understanding of prosody, a neglected aspect of spoken language, the importance of which in speech production, speech perception and language acquisition has now begun to emerge. A better understanding of prosody will also lead to more natural speech synthesis and, possibly, more efficient speech recognition systems. With such a tool in hand, we will be much more prepared to examine current issues in Catalan prosody.

Thus, future Cat_ToBI databases can be used for several purposes:

  • conducting research on the prosodic phenomena encoded in the Cat_ToBI tiers by searching the corpus;
  • using the prosodic analysis and quantitative data derived from Cat_ToBI for modeling prosody for speech synthesis;
  • obtaining quantitative results by using the corpus as an annotated database;
  • teaching Catalan prosody both to students of linguistics and to second language learners.