Reference-Independent Prosody Evaluation Based On Prosodic Unit Segmentation

This paper proposes prosodic unit based segmentation for prosody evaluation by using pitch accent detection and forced alignment techniques. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to evaluate the prosody of non-native English speakers without reference utterances. Experimental results show the superiority of prosodic unit segmentation over word segmentation in terms of classification accuracy and dimension of the feature vectors used by SVM.