Title:
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Paragraph prosodic patterns to enhance text-to-speech naturalness
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Author:
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Peiró-Lilja, Àlex; Farrús, Mireia
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Abstract:
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Comunicació presentada a: the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, celebrat del 13 al 16 de juny a Poznań, Polònia. |
Abstract:
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Speech synthesis has reached a reasonable high quality in recent
years. However, there is still room for improvement in terms of
naturalness and expressiveness when dealing with large multisentential
discourse, since most text-to-speech synthesizers do
not fully take into account the prosodic differences that have
been observed in discourse units such as paragraphs. This work
presents an implementation of paragraph-based prosodic patterns
into the open-source MARYTTS platform, enriching its
prosody output by means of intra- and inter-paragraph prosodic
features. The set of characteristics include pitch decay, pitch
range and speech rate variation (as intra-paragraph features), as
well as paragraph break pauses and speech rate variation (as
inter-paragraph features), previously analyzed in a large set of
TED Talks and read-speech sections of the Spoken Wikipedia
Corpus. The perception tests, performed both in English and
German parametric voices, suggest that paragraph-based features
should be further studied and taken into account on future
implementations to synthesize large discourse speech. |
Abstract:
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The authors would like to thank all listeners that took part in
the experiments. This work is part of the KRISTINA project,
which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant
Agreement number H2020-RIA-645012. The second author is
partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry
and Competitiveness through the Ram´on y Cajal program. |
Subject(s):
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-Parametric speech synthesis -Text-to-speech -Prosody -Paragraph prosody patterns -MARYTTS |
Rights:
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© 2018 ISCA.
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Document type:
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Conference Object Article - Published version |
Published by:
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International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
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