Combining multiple estimators of speaking rate

We report progress in the development of a measure of speaking rate that is computed from the acoustic signal. The newest form of our analysis incorporates multiple estimates of rate; besides the spectral moment for a full-band energy envelope that we have previously reported, we also used pointwise correlation between pairs of compressed sub-band energy envelopes. The complete measure, called mrate, has been compared to a reference syllable rate derived from a manually transcribed subset of the Switchboard database. The correlation with transcribed syllable rate is significantly higher than our earlier measure; estimates are typically within 1-2 syllables/second of the reference syllable rate. We conclude by assessing the use of mrate as a detector for rapid speech.