Design of a speech corpus for research on cross-lingual prosody transfer

Abstract

Since the prosody of a spoken utterance carries information about its discourse function, salience, and speaker attitude, prosody models and prosody generation modules have played a crucial part in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems from the beginning, especially those set not only on sounding natural, but also on showing emotion or particular speaker intention. Prosody transfer within speech-to-speech translation is a recent research area with increasing importance, with one of its most important research topics being the detection and treatment of salient events, i.e. instances of prominence or focus which do not result from syntactic constraints, but are rather products of semantic or pragmatic level effects. This paper presents the design and the guidelines for the creation of a multilingual speech corpus containing prosodically rich sentences, ultimately aimed at training statistical prosody models for multilingual prosody transfer in the context of expressive speech synthesis.