Study and quantification of the declination for the Arabic speech synthesis system PARADIS

The modeling of the melody in a Text-To-Speech System is indispensable to have a good quality of synthesis and to approach the naturalness. The study of the melody generally includes the analysis of the local melody events relating to the accent and the declination of the global melody contour of an utterance. In this paper, we will present an experimental study of the declination phenomenon concerning the Arabic language. Our observations and results are of a great contribution for the quality of synthesis in our Text-To-Speech system PARADIS (Psola ARAbic DIsyllable Synthesizer). The melodic model that we have integrated in PARADIS is based on the prediction of a declination line on which local melodic events related to stressed syllables would be superimposed. Our study will include the description and the classification of the declination line in a context of isolated sentences. The classification will be established mainly according to the modality and the number of syllables in the sentence. We will also study the phenomenon related to the resetting of F0 value which often affect the declination.