Edinburgh Research Archive logo

Edinburgh Research Archive

University of Edinburgh homecrest
View Item 
  •   ERA Home
  • Centre for Speech Technology Research
  • CSTR publications
  • View Item
  •   ERA Home
  • Centre for Speech Technology Research
  • CSTR publications
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Modelling prominence and emphasis improves unit-selection synthesis

View/Open
p540.pdf (56.09Kb)
Date
2007
Author
Strom, Volker
Nenkova, Ani
Clark, Robert A J
Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda
Brenier, Jason
King, Simon
Jurafsky, Daniel
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cost and showed that listeners preferred these synthesised sentences. We also describe an improved recording script for collecting emphatic accents, and show that generating emphatic accents leads to further improvements in the fiction genre over incorporating pitch accent only. Finally, we show differences in the effects of prominence between child-directed speech and news and fiction genres. Index Terms: speech synthesis, prosody, prominence, pitch accent, unit selection
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1992
Collections
  • CSTR publications
  • Linguistics and English Language publications

Library & University Collections HomeUniversity of Edinburgh Information Services Home
Privacy & Cookies | Takedown Policy | Accessibility | Contact
Privacy & Cookies
Takedown Policy
Accessibility
Contact
feed RSS Feeds

RSS Feed not available for this page

 

 

All of ERACommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsPublication TypeSponsorSupervisorsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsPublication TypeSponsorSupervisors
LoginRegister

Library & University Collections HomeUniversity of Edinburgh Information Services Home
Privacy & Cookies | Takedown Policy | Accessibility | Contact
Privacy & Cookies
Takedown Policy
Accessibility
Contact
feed RSS Feeds

RSS Feed not available for this page