World-renowned phonetician Daniel Hirst gave a lecture on “The Automatic Display, Annotation and Evaluation of Speech Prosody” at School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University on May 27. Professor Hongwei Ding chaired this meeting. Teacher Jiang Yan and students from Speech-Language-Hearing Center attended the lecture.

Based on the progress of related empirical studies, Professor Hirst emphasized the importance of prosody from the point of the intelligibility of communication and the naturalness of speech synthesis. He further illustrated details about the annotation of prosody, prosody and metrics, annotation of tone, and multi-modal corpus. During the lecture, Professor Hirst explained the work pattern and characteristics of several tools for automatic annotation, speech alignment, syllabification and modeling.
 

During the Q&A session, Professor Hirst discussed with SFL teachers and students about the programming and usage of annotation tools, feedback and evaluation of the acquisition of prosody, the prosodic hierarchy and the emotional prosody. The meeting ended with warm applause.