Towards automatic extraction of prosodic patterns for speech synthesis

Abstract

This paper deals with the adaptation of AuToBI annotation for speech synthesis purposes. AuToBI is a tool that automatically determines and classifies the standard ToBI labels for American English. AuToBI annotation is performed word-by-word. However, for speech synthesis applications that use various layers of linguistic annotation (syntax, semantic information and prosody structures) and, in particular, for the detection of the correlation between the information structure and prosody, a labeling of intonation patterns at the intonational phrase level is essential. We present a rule-based procedure for initial AuToBI annotation and its adaptation a phrase-based annotation, avoiding thus a post-processing stage of the extracted labels. To validate our/nproposal, the outcome of the procedure is compared with manual annotation and with patterns prognosticated by information structure–prosody correlation argued for by main stream theories.