ToBI (Tones and Break Indices)

Full details of the ToBI transcription system, which is gradually being used more and more for the analysis of intonation, both manual and automatic, are available from the following places:

ToBI in general

English ToBI.

German ToBI, Stuttgart version (Jörg Mayer),

There are also applications to other languages, which can be found on the Internet.

The following summary is adapted from [4].

1. The ``orthographic'' level of the ToBI system contains the orthographic words of the utterance (sometimes only partial words in the case of spontaneous speech). It is also possible to represent filled pauses (e.g. ``um'', ``er'') at this level.
2. The ``miscellaneous'' level may be used to mark the duration of such phenomena as silence, audible breaths, laughter and dysfluencies. There is no exhaustive list of categories for this level, and different transcription projects may make their own decisions as to what to annotate.
3. The ``break index'' level is used to mark break indices, which are numbers representing the strength of the boundary between two orthographic words. The number 0 represents no boundary (with phonetic evidence of cliticisation, e.g. resyllabification of a consonant), and 4 represents a full intonation phrase boundary (usually ``end of sentence'' in read speech), defined by the occurrence of a final boundary tone after the last phrase tone. The number 3 represents an intermediate phrase boundary, defined by the occurrence of a phrase tone after the last pitch accent, while the number 1 represents most phrase-medial word boundaries. The number 2 represents either a strong disjuncture with pause but no tonal discontinuity, or a disjuncture that is weaker than expected at a tonally-signalled full intonation or intermediate phrase boundary.
4. The ``tone'' level is used to mark the occurrence of phonological tones at appropriate points in the F0 contour. The basic tones are ``L'' or ``H'' (for ``low'' and ``high''), but these may function as pitch accents, phrase accents or boundary tones, depending on their location in the prosodic unit. In the case of pitch accents (which occur on accented syllables), there may be one or two tones, and the H tone may or may not be ``downstepped''.