Focus to Emphasize Tone Structures for Prosodic Analysis in Spoken Language Generation

We analyze the concept of focus in speech and the relationship between focus and speech acts for prosodic generation. We determine how the speaker’s utterances are influenced by speaker’s intention. The relationship between speech acts and focus information is used to define which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose the Focus to Emphasize Tones (FET) structure to analyze the focus components. We also design the FET grammar to analyze the intonation patterns and produce tone marks as a result of our analysis. We present a proof-of-the-concept working example to validate our proposal. More comprehensive evaluations are part of our current work.