Piet Mertens' home page

Piet Mertens is emeritus professor of French linguistics from Leuven university (Belgium). 

He obtained an MA in romance philology in 1980, and in 1987 a Ph.D. in linguistics with a study on French intonation, based on the descriptive analysis of spontaneous speech and on acoustic analysis and modelling, resulting in a new, comprehensive phonological model of French intonation. 

He collaborated with research groups such as FPMs (Mons, Belgium), LIMSI (Orsay, France), LATL (Geneva), Cental (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium),  Modyco (Paris), and the speech therapy group at Leuven university hospital, on projects related to text-to-speech synthesis, acoustic analysis, perceptual modelling and stylization of pitch variation in speech, computational linguistics, parsing, lexical databases, large-scale speech corpora, and the analysis of prosody of children with cochlear implants or suffering from autism spectrum disorders. 

At Leuven university and at the Kortrijk campus, he taught courses on the following topics:

• • phonetics, phonology and prosody of French,

  • pronunciation and lexicon of French,

  • syntax of spoken French (dependency grammar, valency, macro-syntax and prosody-syntax interface),

  • acoustic phonetics, and acoustic analysis and modelling of speech prosody,

  • phonological models of prosody in Dutch,

  • computational linguistics. 

Contact: mertens dot piet at gmail dot com

His research focused on the following topics:

• • Phonetics and phonology of intonation in French.

  • Acoustic analysis and perceptual modelling of speech prosody. This work resulted in software tools for the analysis and stylization of pitch variations in speech (Prosogram), and for the automatic phonological transcription of pitch contours (Polytonia).

  • The prosody-syntax interface in French, i.e. the relationship between syntactic structure and intonation.

  • Verb valency in French, within the methodological framework of the Pronominal Approach (proposed by Karel van den Eynde, Claire Blanche-Benveniste, and others). This research, in collaboration with Karel van den Eynde, resulted in the Dicovalence valency dictionary (and lexical database) for French.

  • Computational linguistics applied to French, including morphological analysis and generation, lemmatization, parsing in a dependency-based lexicalized framework.

  • Text-to-speech synthesis for French (Mingus-TTS system), with special interest on prosody generation starting from syntactic structure.

For this research he used the following programming languages: Pascal, C, Prolog, Perl, Praat, Dart, Flutter.

• • Prosogram - A tool for pitch stylization and automatic analysis of speech prosody

  • Polytonia - A notation and an algorithm for transcribing pitch levels and pitch movements in speech

  • Mingus TTS - Intonation generation for text-to-speech synthesis, based on syntactic structure of input text

  • Dicovalence - Valency dictionary for French verbs

  • Manual of Articulatory Phonetics by W.A. Smalley

  • Fonilex - A pronunciation database of Dutch in Flanders

These publications are listed in reverse chronological order. For most of them, the full text is available on:

• ResearchGate.net

• Academia.edu

• Lirias (Digital Repository of Leuven University)

Citation indices are available on the following sites:

• Google Scholar

• CiteSeer Publication Index

2022

Mertens, Piet (2022) The Prosogram model for pitch stylization and its applications in intonation transcription. in Barnes, J.A. and Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (eds) (2022) Prosodic Theory and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 259-286. ISBN 978-0-262-54317-0.

2020

Mertens, Piet (2020) Prosogram user's guide. Technical report, available here. 54 p.

Mertens, Piet (2020) Phonétique, phonologie et prosodie du français. Leuven: Acco (www.acco.be). 293 pp. ISBN 9789464140590.

2019

Mertens, Piet (2019) Phonétique, phonologie et prosodie du français. Leuven: Acco (www.acco.be). 266 pp. ISBN 9789463794916.

Mertens, Piet (2019) From pitch stylization to automatic tonal annotation of speech corpora. in Lacheret-Dujour, A.; Kahane, S.; Pietrandrea, P. (eds) (2019) Rhapsodie. A prosodic and syntactic treebank for spoken French. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publ. ISBN: 978 90 272 0220 8. pp. 233-250.

2017

van den Eynde, Karel; Mertens, Piet; Eggermont, Carmen (2017). Dicovalence. Dictionnaire de valence des verbes du français. Available at https://www.ortolang.fr/market/lexicons/dicovalence 

2014

Mertens, Piet (2014) Polytonia: a system for the automatic transcription of tonal aspects in speech corpora. Journal of Speech Sciences 4 (2), 17-57.

Bardiaux, Alice & Mertens, Piet (2014) Normalisation des contours intonatifs et étude de la variation régionale en français. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française 31, 273-284.

2013

Mertens, Piet (2013) A classification of French adverbs based on distributional, syntactic and prosodic criteria. Lingvisticae Investigationes 36 (2), 201-228. Special Issue "Adverbes et compléments adverbiaux / Adverbs and adverbial complements." edited by Radimský, Jan and Ignazio Mauro Mirto.

Mertens, Piet and Simon, Anne Catherine (2013) Towards automatic detection of prosodic boundaries in spoken French. in Mertens, Piet and Simon, Anne Catherine (eds) (2013) Proceedings of the Prosody-Discourse Interface Conference 2013 (IDP-2013). Leuven, September 11-13, 2013. pp. 81-87. ISBN: 9-789090278-76-6.

Mertens, Piet and Simon, Anne Catherine (eds) (2013) Proceedings of the Prosody-Discourse Interface Conference 2013 (IDP-2013). Leuven, September 11-13, 2013. ISBN: 9-789090278-76-6

Mertens, Piet (2013) Automatic labelling of pitch levels and pitch movements in speech corpora. in Bigi, Brigitte & Hirst, Daniel (2013) Proceedings TRASP 2013, Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody. (Aix-en-Provence, August 30, 2013), pp. 42-46. ISBN 978-2-7466-6443-2.

2012

Mertens, Piet (2012) Transcription of tonal aspects in speech and a system for automatic tonal annotation. Advancing Prosodic Transcription Workshop at Laboratory Phonology 2012, Stuttgart, 29 july 2012.

Mertens, Piet (2012) La prosodie des clivées. in: Caddéo, Sandrine; Roubaud, Marie-Noëlle ; Rouquier, Magali ; Sabio, Frédéric (ed.) (2012) Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Collection Langues et langage, 20. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 256 pages. p. 127-139. ISBN 978-2-85399-820-8

2011

Mertens, Piet (2011) Prosodie, syntaxe, discours : autour d'une approche prédictive. in: Yoo, H-Y & Delais-Roussarie, E. (eds), Actes d'IDP 2009, Paris, Septembre 2009, ISSN 2114-7612, pp. 19-32. Proceedings available at http://makino.linguist.jussieu.fr/idp09/actes_fr.html. PDF of article. Audio samples

2010

Mertens, Piet (2010) Le calcul des restrictions de sélection à partir des paradigmes de pronoms dans DICOVALENCE. in Vitas, Dusko & Krstev, Cvetana (eds) Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Lexis and Grammar, (Belgrade, sept 15-18, 2010), pp. 227-237.

Mertens, Piet (2010) Restrictions de sélection et réalisations syntagmatiques dans DICOVALENCE. Conversion vers un format utilisable en TAL. Actes TALN 2010 (Montréal, 19-23 juillet 2010).

Mertens, Piet & Simon, Anne Catherine (2010) Parataxe et prosodie. in: Béguelin, Marie-José; Avanzi, Mathieu; Corminboeuf, Gilles (2010) La parataxe. Tome 2: Structures, marquages et exploitations discursives. Berne: Peter Lang. pp. 285-306. (Actes du 1er colloque suisse de macro-syntaxe, Neuchâtel, 12-15 février 2006)

2009

Mertens, Piet (2011) Prosodie, syntaxe, discours : autour d'une approche prédictive. Actes du colloque IDP2009 (Interface Discours Prosodie), Paris, 9-11 septembre 2009. Published in 2011, see above. Audio samples

2008

Mertens, Piet (2008) Factorisation des contraintes syntaxiques dans un analyseur de dépendance. Actes du Congrès TALN 2008 (Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel), Avignon, 9-13 juin 2008.

Mertens, Piet (2008) Syntaxe, prosodie et structure informationnelle : une approche prédictive pour l'analyse de l'intonation dans le discours. Travaux de Linguistique 56(1), 87-124. (Duculot) Audio samples

2007

Mertens, Piet (2007) Un formalisme pour grammaires de dépendance lexicalisées non linéarisées et son application à l'analyse automatique du français. Unpublished manuscript (available on ResearchGate). 43 pages.

2006

Mertens, Piet; Fairon, Cédrick; Dister, Anne; Watrin, Patrick (eds) (2006) Verbum ex machina. Actes de la 13e conférence sur le traitement automatique du langage. Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain. 2 volumes. 980 pages. Cahiers du Cental 2. ISBN 2-87-463-023-3.

Mertens, Piet (2006) A Predictive Approach to the Analysis of Intonation in Discourse in French in Kawaguchi, Yuji; Fonagy, Ivan; Moriguchi, Tsunekazu (eds) Prosody and Syntax. Series "Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics" 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-3315-2. pages 64-101. Audio samples

Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth; Caelen-Haumont, Geneviève; Hirst, Daniel; Martin, Philippe; Mertens, Piet (2006)Outils d'aide à l'annotation prosodique de corpus. Bulletin PFC 6, 7-26 (Projet PFC Phonologie du français contemporain) Sous-titre "L'autre versant de PFC" Coordination: Anne Catherine Simon, Geneviève Caelen-Haumont et Claudine Pagliano

2005

Mertens, Piet (2005) Phonétique française. Leuven: Acco. ISBN 90 334 6023 8

2004

Mertens, Piet (2004) Un outil pour la transcription de la prosodie dans les corpus oraux. Traitement Automatique des langues 45 (2), 109-130.

Mertens, Piet (2004) Quelques allers-retours entre la prosodie et son traitement automatique. Le français moderne 72(1), 39-57

Mertens, Piet (2004) The Prosogram : Semi-Automatic Transcription of Prosody based on a Tonal Perception Model. B. Bel & I. Marlien (eds.) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara (Japan), 23-26 March. (ISBN 2-9518233-1-2)

Mertens, Piet (2004) Le prosogramme : une transcription semi-automatique de la prosodie. Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 30, 1-3, 7-25

2003

Eynde, Karel van den & Mertens, Piet (2003) La valence: l'approche pronominale et son application au lexique verbal. Journal of French Language Studies 13, 63-104.

2002

Eynde, Karel van den; Sabine Kirchmeier-Andersen; Piet Mertens; Lene Schoesler (2002) Distributional Syntactic Analysis and Valency : Basic Notions, Procedures and Applications of the Pronominal Approach. in: Nevin, Bruce (ed) (2002) The Legacy of Zellig Harris. Language and information into the 21st century. Volume 2. Mathematics and computability of Language. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 163-202.

Mertens, Piet (2002) Parsing Dependency Grammar using ALE. Proceedings COLING 2002, vol. 2, p. 653-659 (19th Int. Conf. on Comp. Ling., August 26-30, 2002, Taipei, Taiwan)

Mertens, Piet (2002) Les corpus de français parlé ELICOP : consultation et exploitation. in: Binon, Jean; Desmet, Piet; Elen, Jan; Mertens, Piet; Sercu, Lies (eds) (2002) Tableaux Vivants. Opstellen over taal-en-onderwijs aangeboden aan Mark Debrock. Leuven: Universitaire Pers. pp. 101-116.

Binon, Jean; Desmet, Piet; Elen, Jan; Mertens, Piet; Sercu, Lies (eds) (2002)Tableaux Vivants. Opstellen over taal-en-onderwijs aangeboden aan Mark Debrock. Leuven: Universitaire Pers.

Mertens, Piet (2002) Synthesizing Elaborate Intonation Contours in Text-to-Speech for French in Bernard Bel & Isabelle Marlien (eds.), 2002. Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 conference. 11-13 April 2002. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage. p. 499-502.

2001

Mertens, Piet; Auchlin, Antoine; Goldman, Jean-Philippe; Grobet, Anne; Gaudinat, Arnaud (2001) Intonation du discours et synthèse de la parole : premiers résultats d'une approche par balises. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 23, 189-209.

Mertens, Piet; Auchlin, Antoine; Goldman, Jean-Philippe; Grobet, Anne (2001) L'intonation du discours: une implémentation par balises ; motifs et premiers résultats Actes des Journées Prosodie. Grenoble, 10-11 october 2001.

Mertens, Piet (2001) A classification of French adverbs based on distributional, syntactic and prosodic criteria Manuscript, Departement of Linguistics, K.U.Leuven, pp. 21

Mertens, Piet (2001) Compte-rendu de : Hansen, Anita Berit (1998) Les voyelles nasales du français parisien moderne. Aspects Linguistiques, sociolinguistiques et perceptuels des changements en cours. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. University of Copenhagen, p. 373. Travaux de Linguistique 42-43, 255-258

Eynde, Karel van den & Mertens, Piet (2001) La syntaxe du verbe, l'approche pronominale et le lexique de valence PROTON Preprint 174, Departement of Linguistics, K.U.Leuven, pp. 36

Mertens, Piet; Goldman, Jean-Philippe; Wehrli, Eric; Gaudinat, Arnaud (2001) La synthèse de l'intonation à partir de structures syntaxiques riches. Traitement Automatique des Langues 42 (1), 142-195.

2000

Debrock, Mark; Mertens, Piet; Truyen, Fred; Brosens, Veerle (2000) ELICOP. Etude Linguistique de la Communication Parlée. Constitution et exploitation d'un corpus de français parlé automatisé. Annexes. Preprint nr. 173. Department of Linguistics, K.U.Leuven, pp. 78

Debrock, Mark; Mertens, Piet; Truyen, Fred; Brosens, Veerle (2000) ELICOP. Etude Linguistique de la Communication Parlée. Constitution et exploitation d'un corpus de français parlé automatisé. Preprint nr. 172. Department of Linguistics, K.U.Leuven, pp. 40

1999

Mertens, Piet (1999) Un algorithme pour la génération de l'intonation dans la parole de synthèse. Actes Conférence TALN99. (Cargèse, 12-17 juillet 1999) pp. 233-242.

1998

Malfrère, Fabrice; Dutoit, Thierry & Mertens, Piet (1998) Fully Automatic Prosody Generator for Text-to-Speech Synthesis Proceedings International Conference on Speech and Language Processing. (Sidney, Australia) pp. 1395-1398.

Malfrère, Fabrice; Dutoit, Thierry & Mertens, Piet (1998) Automatic prosody generation using suprasegmental unit selection Proc. 3rd ESCA/COCSADA Workshop on Speech Synthesis. (Jenolan Caves, Australia. December 1998) pp. 323-328.

Mertens, Piet (1998) Le traitement de la valence dans un analyseur chart pour grammaires d'unification. ms.

Malfrère, Fabrice; Dutoit, Thierry & Mertens, Piet (1998) Un générateur de prosodie "tout automatique". Actes XXII Journées d'Etude sur la Parole. pp. 147-150 (Martigny, Suisse, juin 1998)

Mertens, Piet (1998) Design of a chart parser for unification grammars. ms.

Eynde, K. van den; Mertens, P. & Swiggers, P. (1998) Structuration segmentale et suprasegmentale en syntaxe: vers un modèle intégrationniste de l'écrit et de l'oral. in: Bilger, M.; van den Eynde, K. & Gadet, F. (1998) Analyse linguistique et approches de l'oral. Recueil d'études offert en hommage à Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Collection "Orbis/Supplementa 10", Leuven-Paris: Peeters, pp. 33-57.

1997

Mertens, P.; Vercammen, F (1997) Fonilex Manual. Internal report. pp. 29.

Mertens, P.; Beaugendre, F. & Alessandro, Ch. d' (1997) Comparing approaches to pitch contour stylization for speech synthesis. in Santen, Jan P.H. van; Sproat, Richard W.; Olive, Joseph P. & Hirschberg, Julia (eds), Progress in Speech Synthesis. New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 347-363.

Mertens, P. (1997) De la chaîne linéaire à la séquence de tons. Traitement Automatique des Langues 38/1, 27-51 (Paris: Klincksieck)

1995

Mertens, P. & Alessandro, Ch. d' (1995) Pitch contour stylization using a tonal perception model. Proceedings 13th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Vol. 4, 228-231. (Stockholm, august 1995)

Alessandro, C. d'; Mertens, P. (1995) Automatic pitch contour stylization using a model of tonal perception. Computer Speech and Language 9(3), 257-288.

1994

Alessandro, C. d'; Mertens, P. & Beaugendre, F. (1994) Automatic stylisation of intonation: application to speech synthesis. Proceedings 2nd ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis (Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY. Sept. 12-15, 1994) pp. 155-158.

1993

Mertens, P. (1993a) Accentuation, intonation et morphosyntaxe. Travaux de Linguistique 26, 21-69

Mertens, P. (1993b) Intonational grouping, boundaries, and syntactic structure in French. in House, D. & Touati, P. (ed) (1993) Proceedings ESCA Workshop on Prosody. (September 27-29, 1993. Lund, Sweden) Working Papers 41 (Lund Univ., Dept. of Linguistics). pp. 156-159.

Verstraete, J.; Forrez, G.; Mertens, P. & Debruyne, F. (1993) The effect of sustained phontion at high and low pitch on vocal jitter and shimmer.  Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 45 (5), 223-228.       

1992

Mertens, P. (1992) L'accentuation de syllabes contiguës ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics 95-96, 145-165.

1991

Mertens, P. (1991) Local prominence of acoustic and psychoacoustic functions and perceived stress in French. Proceedings 12th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. (Aix-en-Provence) Vol. 3, 218-221.

1990

Mertens, P. (1990) Chap. IV. L'intonation. in: Blanche-Benveniste, C. et al (1990). Le français parlé. Etudes grammaticales. Paris: Éditions du CNRS. pp. 159-176

1989

Mertens, P. (1989) Automatic recognition of intonation in French and Dutch. Proceedings Eurospeech 1989. Vol. 1. pp. 46-50. (Paris)

1987

Mertens, P. (1987a) L'intonation du français. De la description linguistique à la reconnaissance automatique. Unpublished Ph.D. (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Mertens, P. (1987b) Automatic segmentation of speech into syllables in: Laver & Jack (eds) (1987) Proceedings of the European Conf. on Speech Technology. Edinburgh: CEP Consultants. Vol. II, 9-12.

1983

Mertens, P. (1983) Etude acoustique de la variation de hauteur des fricatives sourdes. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics 60, 1-26.