Prosodic features’ criterion for hebrew

Prosody provides important information about intention and meaning, and carries clues regarding dialogue turns, phrase emphasis and even the physiological or emotional condition of the speaker. Prosody has been researched extensively by linguists and speech scientists; However, little attention has been given to formulating and ranking the acoustic features that represent prosodic information. This paper aims at defining a simple methodology that allows us to test whether a feature conveys prosodic information. This way, we can compare different features and rate them as prosodic or content related (In this paper the word “content” refers to the verbal information of the utterance.). We explore many features using a Hebrew dataset especially designed for validating prosodic features, and as the first step of our research we chose two prosody classes: neutral and question. We apply our methodology successfully and find that prosodic features indeed are invariant to the content of the utterance, while correlating with prosodic manifestations. We validate our methodology by showing that our ranking of prosodic features yields similar results to classification based feature selection.