Inter-transcriber reliability for two systems of prosodic annotation: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch)
Mara E. Breen, Laura C. Dilley, John D. Kraemer, Edward A. F. Gibson · Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory · 2012
Abstract Speech researchers often rely on human annotation of prosody to generate data to test hypotheses and generate models. We present an overview of two prosodic annotation systems: ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) (Silverman et al., 1992), and RaP (Rhythm and Pitch) (Dilley & Brown, 2005), which was designed to address several limitations of ToBI. The paper reports two large-scale studies of inter-transcriber reliability for ToBI and RaP. Comparable reliability for both systems was obtained for a variety of prominence- and boundary-related agreement categories. These results help to establish RaP as an alternative to ToBI for research and technology applications.