The simulation of stress patterns in synthetic speech - A two-level problem

Abstract

This paper is part of an MSc. report on a program called GENIE (Generator of Inflected English), written in CProlog, that acts as a front end to an existing speech synthesis program. It allows the user to type a sentence in English text, and then processes it so that the synthesiser will output it with natural-sounding inflection; that is, as well as transcribing text to a phonemic form that can be read by the system, it assigns this text an fO contour. The assigning of this stress is described in this paper, and it is asserted that the problem can be solved with reference to two main levels, the sentential and the syllabic.