Identifying characteristic prosodic patterns through the analysis of the information of Sp_ToBI label sequences

This paper presents a novel methodology to characterize the style of different speakers or groups of speakers. This methodology uses sequences of prosodic labels (automatic Sp_ToBI labels) to compare and differentiate these speaking styles. A set of metrics based on conditional entropy is used to compute the distance between two speakers or group of speakers depending on the use of sequences of prosodic labels. Additionally, the most contrastive sequences of labels are identified as characteristic patterns of the speaking styles represented in a given corpus. When this methodology is applied to a corpus of radio news items, the result is that the most frequent prosodic patterns coincide with those previously characterized in studies about radio style. Finally, a perceptual test verifies that the participants attribute these characteristic patterns to the radio news style.