Exploring the Correlation of Pitch Accents and Semantic Slots for Spoken Language Understanding

We investigate the correlation between pitch accents and semantic slots in human-machine speech. Using an automatic pitch accent detector on the ATIS corpus, we find that most words labelled with semantic slots also carry a pitch accent. Most of the pitch accented words that are not associated with a semantic label are still meaningful, pointing towards the speaker’s intention. Our findings show that prosody constitutes a relevant and useful resource for spoken language understanding, especially considering the fact that our pitch accent detector does not require any kind of manual transcriptions during testing time.