Compilation of Corpora for the study of the Information Structure-Prosody interface

Abstract

Theoretical studies on the Information Structure–prosody interface argue that the content packaged in terms of theme and rheme correlates with the intonation of the corresponding sentence. However, there are few empirical studies that support this argument and even fewer resources that promote reproducibility and scalability of experiments. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for the compilation of annotated corpora to study the correspondence between Information Structure and prosody. The application of this methodology is exemplified on a corpus of read speech in English annotated with hierarchical thematicity and automatically extracted prosodic parameters.