Using generalized additive models and random forests to model prosodic prominence in German

The perception of prosodic prominence is influenced by differ-ent sources like different acoustic cues, linguistic expectations and context. We use a generalized additive model and a ran-dom forest to model the perceived prominence on a corpus of spoken German. Both models are able to explain over 80 % of the variance. While the random forests give us some insights on the relative importance of the cues, the general additive model gives us insights on the interaction between different cues to prominence. Index Terms: prosody, prominence, gam, random forests 1