Russian Intonation Corpus: A preliminary report

The paper presents Russian Intonation Corpus (RINCO), the multimedia speech corpus designed for the study of prosody in Russian, its history, purpose, and functionality. RINCO started as a series of MS Access databases developed in 2004–2009 by a research team at the philological faculty of Moscow State University led by S. V. Kodzasov. The databases contained descriptions of most important prosodic characteristics (several tonal features, tempo, loudness, phonation types) for quasi-natural dialog utterances, as well as for a selection of spontaneous and prepared spoken narrative texts of different genres. These descriptions have been transferred to a multi-layer time-aligned markup format, suitable for local use in ELAN annotator and for online browsing, playback and search using the LAT server platform. Various possibilities of enhancing the corpus are discussed, as well as some findings with a sample query for “IK-5” intonational construction. The project is supported by RFH grant #11-04-12042