Application Of The Liberman-Prince Stress Rules To Computer Synthesized Speech

Computer synthesized speech is and will continue to be an important feature of many artificially intelligent systems. Although current computer synthesized speech is intelligible, it cannot yet pass a Turing test. One avenue for improving the intelligibility of computer synthesized speech and for making it more human-like is to incorporate stress patterns on words. But to achieve this improvement, a set of stress prediction rules amenable to computer implementation is needed. This paper evaluates one such theory for predlcting stress, that of Liberman and Prince. It first gives an overview of the theory and then discusses modifications which were necessary for computer implementation. It then describes an experiment which was performed to determine the model's strengths and shortcomings. The paper concludes with the results of that study.