Using Dynamic Time Warping to compute prosodic similarity measures

This paper presents the use of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) for measuring prosodic differences between variable-sized sentences. This methodological study may apply to various prosodic functions, accented or expressive speech. Both the structuring and attitudinal functions of prosody are investigated here. We evaluated the relevance of three prosodic (dis)similarity measures to account for perceived variations. The importance of constraints on the DTW alignment process is highlighted, together with the possibility to use prosodic features beyond pitch. Results show the effectiveness of DTW-based measurements to capture different syntactic-prosodic structures and to cluster prosodically similar attitudinal expressions, irrespective of the utterance length.