Modeling intensity contours and the interaction of pitch and intensity to improve automatic prosodic event detection and classification

Prosody, or the way words are spoken, carries important information to understanding a speaker's communicative intention. Many studies on automatic prosodic analysis focus on parameterizing pitch content. In this work, we extend previous pitch contour modeling features to intensity contours, and develop a set of features based on the interaction of pitch and intensity. These new features improve the state-of-the-art on all prosodic event detection and classification tasks related to automatic ToBI labeling.