The detection of prosodic characteristics is an important aspect of both speech synthesis and speech recognition. Correct placement of pitch accents aids in more natural sounding speech, while automatic detection of accents can contribute to better wordlevel recognition and better textual understanding. In this paper we investigate probabilistic, contextual, and phonological factors that influence pitch accent placement in natural, conversational speech in a sequence labeling setting. We introduce Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to pitch accent prediction task in order to incorporate these factors efficiently in a sequence model. .
