This award in the NSF/DARPA Joint Initiative on Image Understanding and Speech Recognition is for the study of prosody as a tool in speech recognition and understanding. Prosody includes such features as lexical and phrasal stress, intonation contours, and metrical phrase structure. Separating these processes from the syntactic elements of speech analysis should reduce word error rates and provide clues to intended meaning. Drs. Ostendorf, Price, and Shattuck-Hufnagel will begin with a study of radio-announcer speech (already begun under NSF Grant IRI-8805680), and will incorporate their findings into the spoken language system at SRI International.
