Title:
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Thematicity-based prosody enrichment for text-to-speech applications
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Author:
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Domínguez Bajo, Mónica; Burga Díaz, Alicia; Farrús, Mireia; Wanner, Leo
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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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Theoretical studies on the information structure–prosody interface
argue that the content packaged in terms of theme and
rheme correlates with the intonation of the corresponding sentence
as regards to rising and falling patterns (L*+H LH% and
H* LL% respectively). When such a correspondence is used
to derive prosody in text-to-speech applications, it is often the
case that ToBI labels are statically mapped to acoustic parameters.
Such an approach is insufficient to solve the problem of
monotonous synthetic voices for two reasons: it is repetitive
with respect to prosody enrichment, and a binary flat themerheme
representation does not serve to describe properly long
complex sentences. In this paper, we introduce a methodology
for a more versatile thematicity-based prosody enrichment
based on: (i) a hierarchical tripartite thematicity model as proposed
in the Meaning–Text Theory, and (ii) a corpus-based approach
for the automatic extraction of acoustic parameters (fundamental
frequency, breaks and speech rate) that are mapped to
a varied range of prosody control tags of the synthesized speech.
Such a prosody enrichment has shown to provide higher results
in a perception test when implemented in a TTS system. |
Abstract:
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This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received
funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 Research
and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number
H2020-RIA-645012. It has been also partly supported by
the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under
the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-
2015-0502). The second author is partially funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Economy and Competitivity through the Ram´on
y Cajal program. |
Subject(s):
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-Prosody -Information structure -Theme -Rheme -TTS -SSML |
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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