Assigning intonation elements and prosodic phrasing for English speech synthesis from high level linguistic input

Abstract

This paper describes a method for generating intonation events and prosodic phrasing from a high level linguistic description. Specifically, the input consists of information normally available from linguistic processing: part of speech, constituent structure, and, importantly, speech act. The generated output contains explicit intonational events from which an F0 contour may be generated. Prosody can be controlled via features in the input describing the function of words and phrases without direct reference to intonation.The results are evaluated against natural spoken sentences.