MalToBI – building an annotated corpus of Spoken Maltese

Abstract

Research on the phonetics and phonology of Maltese, and in particular on different aspects of its prosody, is, thus far, rather limited. This is in part due to the lack of structured resources for use in research. One resource which, to date, has been unavailable, is a corpus of spoken Maltese. Such a corpus, could, amongst other things, be used as a ready resource for the analysis of various aspects of the phonetics and phonology of Maltese. Moreover, given the limited research in the area of Maltese prosody, a speech corpus including an element of prosodic annotation could be particularly important for the continuing development of resources in the domain of Text-to-Speech (TTS) in the local context. Recognition of the requirement of such a corpus gave rise to MalToBI, a project involving the collection of a relatively small body of spoken Maltese, together with the development of a Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) framework adapted for use with Maltese. This paper gives a brief outline of some aspects of the prosody of Maltese and describes the development of this corpus. It discusses design considerations in some detail, and it outlines the progress made so far as well as the intentions for future work.