The Information structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies: an empirical perspective

Domínguez Bajo, Mónica; Farrús, Mireia; Wanner, Leo

The Information structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies: an empirical perspective

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dc.contributor.author Domínguez Bajo, Mónica
dc.contributor.author Farrús, Mireia
dc.contributor.author Wanner, Leo
dc.date.accessioned 2021-04-01T10:07:14Z
dc.date.issued 2021
dc.description.abstract The correspondence between the communicative intention of a speaker in terms of Information Structure and the way this speaker reflects communicative aspects by means of prosody have been a fruitful field of study in Linguistics. However, text-to-speech applications still lack the variability and richness found in human speech in terms of how humans display their communication skills. Some attempts were made in the past to model one aspect of Information Structure, namely thematicity for its application to intonation generation in text-to-speech technologies. Yet these applications suffer from two limitations: (i) they draw upon a small number of made-up simple question-answer pairs rather than on real (spoken or written) corpus material; and (ii) they do not explore whether any other interpretation would better suit a wider range of textual genres beyond dialogues. In this paper, two different interpretations of thematicity in the field of speech technologies are examined: the state-of-art binary (and flat) theme-rheme, and the hierarchical thematicity defined by Igor Mel’ˇcuk within the Meaning-Text Theory. The outcome of the experiments on a corpus of native speakers of US English suggests that the latter interpretation of thematicity has a versatile implementation potential for text-to-speech applications of the Information Structure-–prosody interface
dc.description.sponsorship This work has been partially funded by the European Commission in the context of its H2020 Programme under the contract numbers H2020-645012-RIA (KRISTINA) and H2020-870930-IA (WELCOME). The second author has been funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigaci´on (AEI), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovaci´on y Universidades and the Fondo Social Europeo (FSE), grant RYC2015-17239 (AEI/FSE, UE).
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.citation Domínguez M, Farrús M, Wanner L. The Information structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies: an empirical perspective. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. 2021 DOI: 10.1515/cllt-2020-0008
dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2020-0008
dc.identifier.issn 1613-7027
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/47009
dc.language.iso eng
dc.publisher De Gruyter
dc.relation.ispartof Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. 2021
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/645012
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/870930
dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/1PE/RYC2015-17239
dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.subject.keyword Communicative structure
dc.subject.keyword Information structure
dc.subject.keyword Intonation
dc.subject.keyword Prosody
dc.subject.keyword Rheme
dc.subject.keyword Specifier
dc.subject.keyword Thematicity
dc.subject.keyword Theme
dc.subject.keyword ToBI
dc.title The Information structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies: an empirical perspective
dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

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Articles (Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions)
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