The contribution of parsing to prosodic phrasing in an experimental text-to-speech system

Abstract

While various aspects of syntactic structure have been shown to bear on the determination of phraselevel prosody, the text-to-speech field has lacked a robust working system to test the possible relations between syntax and prosody. We describe an implemented system which uses the deterministic parser Fidditch to create the input for a set of prosody rules. The prosody rules generate a prosody tree that specifies the location and relative strength of prosodic phrase boundaries. These specifications are converted to annotations for the Bell Labs text-to-speech system that dictate modulations in pitch and duration for the input sentence. We discuss the results of an experiment to determine the performance of our system. We are encouraged by an initial 5 percent error rate and we see the design of the parser and the modularity of the system allowing changes that will upgrade this rate.