Modeling Prosodic Structures in Linguistically Enriched Environments

A significant challenge in Text-to-Speech (TtS) synthesis is the formulation of the prosodic structures (phrase breaks, pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones) of utterances. The prediction of these elements robustly relies on the accuracy and the quality of error-prone linguistic procedures, such as the identification of the part-of-speech and the syntactic tree. Additional linguistic factors, such as rhetorical relations, improve the naturalness of the prosody, but are hard to extract from plain texts. In this work, we are proposing a method to generate enhanced prosodic events for TtS by utilizing accurate, error-free and high-level linguistic information. We are also presenting an appropriate XML annotation scheme to encode syntax, grammar, new or given information, phrase subject/object information, as well as rhetorical elements. These linguistically enriched has have been utilized to build realistic machine learning models for the prediction of the prosodic structure...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: TSD
• Authors: Gerasimos Xydas, Dimitris Spiliotopoulos, Georgios Kouroupetroglou
• Keywords: Error-prone Linguistic Procedures, Plain Text, Prosodic Structures, Signal Processing, TSD 2004