This paper presents the realisation of an automatically trainable computational prosodic model for French Textto-Speech Synthesis. The methodology proposes the construction of the model in two steps. The first step consists in predicting fundamental frequency contours and duration of syllables from abstract prosodic markers using neural networks [17,12]. In this step, the abstract prosodic mark...

In this study, considering the effect of phrase grouping in spontaneous speech, prosodic words, instead of lexical words, are adopted as the units for error correction of speech recognition results. The prosodic words and the corresponding mis-recognized word fragments are obtained from a speech database to construct a mis-recognized word fragment table for the extracted prosodic words. For eac...

This paper proposes that spontaneous speech, segmented into perceptually coherent prosodic constituents, is able to provide plentiful linguistic information in which clear patterns can be observed. We present pioneering studies with empirical and quantitative evidence, supporting the notion that prosodic units can be useful for the automatic processing of spontaneous speech. High inter-labelers...

We investigate whether 8-month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as reflecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing. The current study shows that in the event-related pot...

Prosodic structure generation from text plays an important role in Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, which greatly influences the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthesized speech. This paper proposes a multi-task learning method for prosodic structure generation using bidirectional long shortterm memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) and structured output layer (SOL). Unl...

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic prosodic marking of demonstrative and personal pronouns in taskoriented dialog. Although it has been hypothesized that acoustic marking affects pronoun resolution, we find that the prosodic information extracted from the data is not sufficient to predict antecedent type reliably. Interspeaker variation accounts for much of the prosodic variation that w...

This paper describes a pioneer study on prosodic control for Cantonese text-to-speech synthesis. We attempt to establish a set of segment-level duration rules and contextdependent F0 profiles and apply them to a syllable-based concatenative speech synthesizer which uses TD-PSOLA as prosodic modification technique. The prosodic features are extracted by statistical characterization of a large am...

A formal prosody description framework is introduced together with its relation to language semantics and NLP. The framework incorporates deep prosodic structures based on a generative grammar of abstract prosodic functionally involved units. This grammar creates for each sentence a structure of immediate prosodic constituents in the form of a tree. A speech corpus manually annotated by such pr...

The purposes of the CoPaSul toolkit are (1) automatic prosodic annotation and (2) prosodic feature extraction from syllable to utterance level. CoPaSul stands for contour-based, parametric, superpositional intonation stylization. In this framework intonation is represented as a superposition of global and local contours that are described parametrically in terms of polynomial coefficients. On t...