In Chinese, anaphors are frequently omitted, termed zero anaphor (ZA), from text due to their prominence. Thus the information carried by ZAs in text can not be used to contribute the calculation of text categorization. In this paper, we employ a ZA resolution method to recover the omissions of anaphors in text. Then the resulting text is used as the input of a text categorization system. The e...

Control of prosody is essential for the synthesis of natural sounding speech. Text-to-speech systems tend to accent too many words when taking into account only the distinction between open-class and closed-class words. In the prominence-based approach [1], the degree of accentuation of a syllable is described in terms of a gradual prominence parameter. This paper presents the calculation of th...

If we focus on ‘relevance’, the textual metafunction creates relevance by adding prominence through assigning relative value to parts of the clause (Matthiessen 1992). The Theme, for instance, functions to select meaning(s) from the clause (Hannay & Martínez Caro, 2008) and to assign them thematic prominence, which has consequences for the thematic development of the text (Fries, 1992) in contr...

Potential visual prosodic cues for prominence and phrasing comprising eyebrow movements were manipulated using a system for audio-visual text-to-speech synthesis which has been implemented based on the KTH rule-based synthesis. Two functions of prosody (prominence and phrasing) were tested in two separate experiments. A test sentence, ambiguous in terms of an internal phrase boundary, was used ...

This work targets to improve the naturalness of synthetic intonational contours in Text-to-Speech synthesis through the provision of prominence, which is a major expression of human speech. Focusing on the tonal dimension of emphasis, we present a robust unit-selection methodology for generating realistic F0 curves in cases where focus prominence is required. The proposed approach is based on s...