This thesis proposes to improve and enrich the expressiveness of English Textto-Speech (TTS) synthesis by identifying and generating natural patterns of prosodic prominence. In most state-of-the-art TTS systems the prediction from text of prosodic prominence relations between words in an utterance relies on features that very loosely account for the combined effects of syntax, semantics, word i...

Explaining speakers' choice of which items to emphasize or de-emphasize intonationally has been an important topic in theoretical linguistics, as well as in applications such as speech synthesis, where accent decisions aaect the naturalness as well as interpretation. Heretofore, most researchers have assumed that detailed syntactic, semantic, and discourse-level information must be available in...

The TF–IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) weight is a well-known indexing weight in information retrieval and text mining. However, it is not suitable for the increasingly popular voice-to-text search, as it does not take into account the impact of voice in the search process. We propose a method for calculating a new indexing weight, which is used as guidance for selection of suit...

This is a summary of variabilities and co-variation of prosodic parameters found in our studies of text reading and in the development of text-to-speech synthesis. In addition to F0, duration and intensity, the survey includes aspects of voice production and perception. The role of sub-glottal pressure is discussed. Speech parameters have been correlated with our continuously graded prominence ...

A significant variability in pitch accent placement is found when comparing the patterns of prosodic prominence realized by different English speakers reading the same sentences. In this paper we describe a simple approach to incorporate this variability to synthesize prosodic prominence in unit selection text-to-speech synthesis. The main motivation of our approach is that by taking into accou...

Based on reasonable assumptions and mathematical approximations a one dimensional, analytical model for solar quiescent prominences is constructed, which is in both magnetohydrostatic and thermal equilibrium. Thermal equilibrium here is a balance among thermal conduction, radiation and wave heating. The wave heating (H) is assumed to be equal to a constant (EH ) times the product of pressure (p...

Besides phrasing, prominence is one of the most important parameters of speech prosody to model. The so called data driven approaches nowadays seem to be the appropriate solution for prosody modeling in current text to speech (TTS) systems. They allow prosodic regularities to be automatically extracted from a prosodic database of natural speech. In this paper we’ll present an evaluation of suit...