Estimating speaking rate in spontaneous discourse
Yishan Jiao, Visar Berisha, Ming Tu, Timothy Huston, Julie Liss · 2015
In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the speaking rate directly from the speech waveform. We propose an algorithm that poses the speaking rate estimation problem as a convex optimization problem. In contrast to existing methods, we avoid the more difficult task of detecting individual syllables within the speech signal and we avoid heuristics like thresholding a loudness function. The algorithm was evaluated on the ICSI Switchboard spontaneous speech corpus and a speech corpus obtained from publicly-available interviews on Youtube.