Prosody is a critical component of spoken communication. Loosely defined, prosody is ?how words are spoken?, as opposed to ?what words are said?. Prosody is typically defined to include pitch, intensity, and timing -- and systematic variation in these parameters can reinforce or augment a speaker?s intended meaning. Prosody provides important information at every linguistic level, disambiguating syntax, augmenting semantics and pragmatic information, e.g. by conveying information about phrasal grouping and phrase-level prominence. Emotions and other speaker-state information are also communicated through a speaker?s prosody.
Although this aspect of speech is important, it remains under-investigated. A major limiting factor is the lack of large sample of prosodically labeled speech. Prosody researchers at CUNY, Columbia and MIT are developing Reciprosody, a web source of prosodically annotated data and tools for analysis. Reciprosody makes critical resources for the study and teaching of prosody available to a growing and diverse population of researchers, students, and technologists. This website hosts data in any language, annotated under any prosody standard. The only restriction for hosting data in the repository is that it must be made freely available for academic and educational activities.
Reciprosody is not merely a passive repository, but an active resource for researchers and educators to communicate with each other on a regular basis. This enables the resource to be a center not only for annotated data, but information and support related to ongoing prosody research.
