Sp_ToBI
labeling system
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Sp_ToBI Labeling System
A Sp_ToBI transcription for an utterance consists of an audio recording of the utterance and three windows (see Figure 1 for an example): the waveform of the utterance, the fundamental frequency (F0) contour of the
utterance, and the five Sp_ToBI annotation tiers:
1. The Orthographic Tier
This tier contains the orthographic transcription of the text and is equivalent to the Orthographic Tier in the American English ToBI.
2. The Phonetic Transcription Tier
This tier contains the phonetic transcription of the text into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and is equivalent to the Orthographic Tier in the American English ToBI.
3. The Break Index Tier (and its diacritics)
The break index tier is based on other ToBI systems, such as MAE_ToBI, Gr-ToBI, etc. There are five break indices, 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4.
4. The Tone Tier
For the intonational analysis of Spanish utterances we recognize two types of tonal events, pitch accents and boundary tones, and two levels of phrasing, the intermediate phrase (ip) and the intonational phrase (IP). The following subsections describe the inventory of those tonal events for Spanish, describing their phonetic realizations and their distributional properties. Even though the work presented here is the result of a long experience with the literature, this is to be considered a work in progress and the tonal units described here are tentative. The Sp_ToBI group continues to collect data and to conduct research on several issues related to intonational contrasts in Spanish.
4.1. The pitch accents
Six basic pitch accents have been found in Spanish:
An explanation about the prototypical phonetic realization and distribution of these accents is described in each one of the links.
4.2. The boundary tones
In Spanish, there have been found:
- 7 IP-final boundary tones:
- 7 ip-final boundary tones:
An explanation about the prototypical phonetic realization and distribution of these accents is described in each one of the links.
5. The Miscellaneous Tier
The Miscellaneous Tier has been used for everything from noting non-speech events to commenting on labelling difficulties. Because much of the notation in this tier has not been standardized, it has been of limited use for drawing conclusions from large labelled corpora.
The miscellaneous tier is in essence a ‘comment’ tier for the optional marking of events of any kind other than the standard words, phonetics, tones, and disjunctures marked on the orthographic tier, the phonetic transcription tier, the tone tier, and the break index tier.
Even if our examples in this webpage do not contain this tier, we encourage to use it to note the following events with the corresponding standard labels:
| EVENT |
SUBTYPE OF EVENT |
LABEL |
| disfluencies |
such phenomena as stumbling over a word, or abruptly cutting off a word or phrase in midstream to make a fragment |
phonetic error |
| lexical self-corrections of parts of sentences |
repair |
| lexical self-corrections of whole sentences |
fresh start |
| |
hesitation pause |
| differences in rate of speech |
increase of the rate of speech |
fast |
| decrease of the rate of speech |
slow |
| cough |
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cough |
| laugh |
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laugh |
| noises |
other noises that parasit the data |
noise |
For more information about the use of the Miscellaneous tier, we invite you to visit the website of the MAE-TOBI Guidelines.
Notice that Brugos et al. (2008) introduces one more labelling tier, the alternatives (alt) tier, which uses standard machine-readable notation to explicitly capture the alternative transcriptions considered for an ambiguous region of an utterance.
References:
Alejna Brugos, Nanette Veilleux, Mara Breen, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, "The Alternatives (Alt) Tier for ToBI: Advantages of Capturing Prosodic Ambiguity", Speech Prosody 2008, Aix-en-Provence.
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