A Metrical Model of Rhythm and Intonation for French Text-to-speech Synthesis

This paper presents the prosodic component of a French text-to-speech synthesis system based on a metrical model of rhythm and intonation in which the prosodic well-formedness of utterances is governed by a set of rhythmic and morphosyntactic constraints. We first set out the theoretic basis of the generation of prosodic levels that correspond to the metrical and tonal structure of utterances. Then, we outline the implementation in our system, and, in particular, the prosodic module that produces a metrical interpretation of phrase-level parsed text, by computing relative prominence levels and generating the F0 patterns and segmental duration. This approach produces high quality results for text-tospeech synthesis at a very minimal implementation cost, and enables a realistic modelling of the prosodic variability observed in real speech.