SFC: A trainable prosodic model

This paper introduces a new model-constrained and data-driven system to generate prosody from metalinguistic information. This system considers the prosodic continuum as the superposition of multiple elementary overlapping multiparametric contours. These contours encode specific metalinguistic functions associated with various discourse units. We describe the phonological model underlying the system and the specific implementation made of that model by the trainable prosodic model described here. The way prosody is analyzed, decomposed and modelled is illustrated by experimental work. In particular, we describe the original training procedure that enables the system to identify the elementary contours and to separate out their contributions to the prosodic contours of the training data.