The corpus VoLIP (The Voice of LIP) is an Italian speech resource which associates the audio signals to the orthographic transcriptions of the LIP Corpus. The LIP Corpus was designed to represent diaphasic, diatopic and diamesic variation. The Corpus was collected in the early ‘90s to compile a frequency lexicon of spoken Italian and its size was tailored to produce a reliable frequency lexicon for the first 3,000 lemmas. Therefore, it consists of about 500,000 word tokens for 60 hours of recording. The speech materials belong to five different text registers and they were collected in four different cities. Thanks to a modern technological approach VoLIP web service allows users to search the LIP corpus using IMDI metadata, lexical or morpho-syntactic entry keys, receiving as result the audio portions aligned to the corresponding required entry. The VoLIP corpus is freely available at the URL http://www.parlaritaliano.it.

Prosodic research in recent years has been supported by a number of automatic analysis tools aimed at simplifying the work that is requested to study intonation. The need to analyze large amounts of data and to inspect phenomena that are often ambiguous and difficult to model makes the prosodic research area an ideal application field for computer based processing. One of the main challenges in this field is to model the complex relations occurring between the segmental level, mainly in terms of syllable nuclei and boundaries, and the supra-segmental level, mainly in terms of tonal movements. The goal of our contribution is to provide a tool for automatic annotation of prosodic data, the Prosomarker, designed to give a visual representation of both segmental and suprasegmental events. The representation is intended to be as generic as possible to let researchers analyze specific phenomena without being limited by assumptions introduced by the annotation itself. A perceptual account of the pitch curve is provided along with an automatic segmentation of the speech signal into syllable-like segments and the tool can be used both for data exploration, in semi-automatic mode, and to process large sets of data, in automatic mode.