Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction

Nigel Ward; Javier Vazquez; Emma (Danny) R. Boushka; Oliver Niebuhr

doi:10.63317/3qachmx9chqu

Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction

Nigel Ward, Javier Vazquez, Emma (Danny) R. Boushka, Oliver Niebuhr

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Abstract

Phonetic reduction is very common in casual speech, where it is associated with several important pragmatic functions. However these phenomena have been little studied. To support investigations and applications, we present tools that automatically estimate the level of perceived phonetic reduction. Trained on annotated dialog data and exploiting HuBert features, these handle American English and Northern Mexican Spanish. For English, word-level predictions correlate up to 0.55 with average human judgments. This is adequate at least for statistical studies of reduction in corpora, as seen in explorations of turn-yielding and prominence-marking behaviors. The tools are open-source and publicly available

Anthology ID:: 2026.lrec-1.434
Volume:: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:: May
Year:: 2026
Address:: Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:: Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:: LREC
SIG:
Publisher:: ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:: 5555–5565
Language:
External URL:: https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-434
DOI:: 10.63317/3qachmx9chqu
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):: Nigel Ward, Javier Vazquez, Emma (Danny) R. Boushka, and Oliver Niebuhr. 2026. Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5555–5565, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):: Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction (Ward et al., LREC 2026)
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@inproceedings{ward-etal-2026-tools,
    title = "Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction",
    author = "Ward, Nigel  and
      Vazquez, Javier  and
      Boushka, Emma (Danny) R.  and
      Niebuhr, Oliver",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.434/",
    doi = "10.63317/3qachmx9chqu",
    pages = "5555--5565",
    abstract = "Phonetic reduction is very common in casual speech, where it is associated with several important pragmatic functions. However these phenomena have been little studied. To support investigations and applications, we present tools that automatically estimate the level of perceived phonetic reduction. Trained on annotated dialog data and exploiting HuBert features, these handle American English and Northern Mexican Spanish. For English, word-level predictions correlate up to 0.55 with average human judgments. This is adequate at least for statistical studies of reduction in corpora, as seen in explorations of turn-yielding and prominence-marking behaviors. The tools are open-source and publicly available"
}

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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction
%A Ward, Nigel
%A Vazquez, Javier
%A Boushka, Emma (Danny) R.
%A Niebuhr, Oliver
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F ward-etal-2026-tools
%X Phonetic reduction is very common in casual speech, where it is associated with several important pragmatic functions. However these phenomena have been little studied. To support investigations and applications, we present tools that automatically estimate the level of perceived phonetic reduction. Trained on annotated dialog data and exploiting HuBert features, these handle American English and Northern Mexican Spanish. For English, word-level predictions correlate up to 0.55 with average human judgments. This is adequate at least for statistical studies of reduction in corpora, as seen in explorations of turn-yielding and prominence-marking behaviors. The tools are open-source and publicly available
%R 10.63317/3qachmx9chqu
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.434/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/3qachmx9chqu
%P 5555-5565

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Markdown (Informal)

[Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.434/) (Ward et al., LREC 2026)

Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction (Ward et al., LREC 2026)

ACL

Nigel Ward, Javier Vazquez, Emma (Danny) R. Boushka, and Oliver Niebuhr. 2026. Tools for Estimating the Perceived Level of Phonetic Reduction. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5555–5565, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.