Estimating Speaking Rate by Means of Rhythmicity Parameters
Christian Heinrich, Florian Schiel · Open access LMU (Ludwid Maxmilian's Universitat Munchen) · 2011
In this paper we present a speech rate estimator based on so-called rhythmicity features derived from a modified version of the short-time energy envelope.To evaluate the new method, it is compared to a traditional speech rate estimator on the basis of semi-automatic segmentation.Speech material from the Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) covering intoxicated and sober speech of different speech styles provides a statistically sound foundation to test upon.The proposed measure clearly correlates with the semi-automatically determined speech rate and seems to be robust across speech styles and speaker states.