Assigning Intonational Features in Synthesized Spoken Directions

Speakers convey much of the information hearers use to interpret discourse by varying prosodic features such as phrasing, pitch accent placement, tune, and pitch range. The ability to emulate such variation is crucial to e ective (synthetic) speech generation. While text-tospeech synthesis must rely primarily upon structural information to determine appropriate intonational features, speech synthesized from an abstract representation of the message to be conveyed may employ much richer sources. The implementation of an intonation assignment component for Direction Assistance, a program which generates spoken directions, provides a rst approximation of how recent models of discourse structure can be used to control intonational variation in ways that build upon recent research in intonational meaning. The implementation further suggests ways in which these discourse models might be augmented to permit the assignment of appropriate intonational features.