A framework for labeling speech with acoustic cues to linguistic distinctive features.

Acoustic cues are characteristic patterns in the speech signal that provide lexical, prosodic, or additional information, such as speaker identity. In particular, acoustic cues related to linguistic distinctive features can be extracted and marked from the speech signal. These acoustic cues can be used to infer the intended underlying phoneme sequence in an utterance. This study describes a framework for labeling acoustic cues in speech, including a suite of canonical cue prediction algorithms that facilitates manual labeling and provides a standard for analyzing variations in the surface realizations. A brief examination of subsets of annotated speech data shows that labeling acoustic cues opens the possibility of detailed analyses of cue modification patterns in speech.