Basic Research

As a member of the Phonetics Group of the Department of Spanish Philology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, my research was focused, on the one hand, to the definition of tools and methodologies for the phonetic description of intonation contours (Garrido, 1991; Garrido and Gudayol, 1991; Klein et al., 1998) and its application to the description and modelling of Spanish intonation (Garrido, 1993; Garrido et al., 1993, 1995; Garrido, 1996; Garrido, 2001). During this time I could also work in several projects related to the development or improvement of the Catalan and Spanish versions of the Text-to-speech systems by Loquendo (Bonaventura et al., 1998; Garrido et al., 2000), CNET (centro de I+D de France Telecom) and Telefónica I+D (Aguilar et al., 1994). These projectes gave me the chance to carry out a three-month stay at the CNET centre in Lannion (France) and some shorter stays (one or two weeks) at the centres of Loquendo in Turin (Italy) and Telefónica I+D in Madrid. I also carried out a three-month stay at Utrecht Unisersity, in the Netherlands (1992), related to my PhD research (Garrido, 1996).

As a member of the Computational Linguistics Group (GLiCom) of the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Pompeu Fabra University (from 2007 until today), my research was oriented, on the one hand, to continue the theoretical research line on Prosody started during my period at UAB. It can be mentioned here first the design, collection and annotation of Glissando, a corpus of readings and dialogues in Spanish and Catalan for the analysis of Prosody, carried out within the framework of a research project funded by the Spanish Government (2008-2011), coordinated by myself, and involving researchers from UPF, UAB and Valladolid university (Aguilar et al., 2009; Escudero et al., 2008, 2010; Garrido et al., 2011). Other results are the development of automatic tools for the analysis and annotation of intonation contours (Garrido, 2010), and its use for the description of intonation patterns of Spanish from the analysis of large corpora in several speaking styles: neutral reading (Garrido, 2012a, 2012b), dialogue (Garrido and Rustullet, 2011) and emotional speech (Garrido, 2011). This methodolgy is also being applied to the description of other languages, such as Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese or Mandarin Chinese (Yao and Garrido, 2010). Another three-year research project, started in 2012, also funded by the Spanish Government and coordinated by me, allowed to continue the research in this line.