The ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis September 25-28, 1990 Autrans, France

A Comparison of Natural, Theoretical and Automatically Derived Accentuations of Dutch Texts

Hugo Quené, Arthur Dirksen

Research Institute for Language and Speech, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

A phrase-level comparison of three transcriptions shows 8% deviation between naturally produced and theoretically predicted accentuations, which is mainly due to variation in pragmatic factors. Deviations between these two templates and the output of an accentuation algorithm are only slightly larger (9% and 11%). Hence, part of the latter deviations may fall within the limits of freedom for pragmatic factors. Some remaining errors could be solved by improving the 'given'/'new' distinction.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Quené, Hugo / Dirksen, Arthur (1990): "A comparison of natural, theoretical and automatically derived accentuations of dutch texts", In SSW1-1990, 137-140.