InSTIL/ICALL 2004 Symposium on Computer Assisted Learning June 17-19, 2004 Venice, Italy

Experiments in Prosody for the Generation of Oral French

Craig Thomas (1), Michael Levison (1), Greg Lessard (2)

(1) School of Computing; (2) French Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

This paper describes a series of experiments designed to allow VINCI, a natural language generation environment, to produce not just orthographic, but also phonetic output in French with the help of the MBROLA speech generator. In order for this to be possible, it is necessary for the syntactic representation of utterances generated by VINCI to contain phonetic symbols and prosodic information, including pitch and length. We show that the resulting system is capable of generating oral output found to be largely acceptable according to a set of human evaluators and describe a number of pratical applications of the system.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Thomas, Craig / Levison, Michael / Lessard, Greg (2004): "Experiments in prosody for the generation of oral French", In ICALL-2004, paper 029.