AutoRPT: A Tool for Bootstrapping Prosodic Annotation

Seth Heiney, Thomas Hicks, Sally Little, Fernanda Lourenco, Kai Retana, Eliana Stevens, Jonathan Howell


Abstract
Automated Rapid Prosody Transcription (AutoRPT) is a tool for bootstrapping manual annotation of prosodic events in either corpora or standalone audio files using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) scheme. It functions by utilizing two Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, trained on measures of pitch/F0 and intensity. In addition to discrete, slightly over-generated predictions of prominence and boundary, AutoRPT produces continuous predictions between 0 and 1, similar to crowd-sourced RPT annotations averaged over listeners. Marginal predictions above a given threshold are also indicated discretely by question marks, as in the PoLaR Annotation Guidelines. Annotators achieved a statistically significant increase in annotation speed by modifying AutoRPT-generated annotations over creating annotations without assistance. In contrast with older tools such as AuToBI (Rosenberg, 2010), AutoRPT generates more theory-agnostic annotations which can support the work of non-expert annotators, and which we expect will offer greater flexibility in the prosodic annotation of other English language varieties.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.443
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:
5640–5648
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-443
DOI:
10.63317/25i8wpabeno4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seth Heiney, Thomas Hicks, Sally Little, Fernanda Lourenco, Kai Retana, Eliana Stevens, and Jonathan Howell. 2026. AutoRPT: A Tool for Bootstrapping Prosodic Annotation. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5640–5648, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
AutoRPT: A Tool for Bootstrapping Prosodic Annotation (Heiney et al., LREC 2026)
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