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

Using Discourse Context to Guide Pitch Accent Decisions in Synthetic Speech

Julia Hirschberg

AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

The paper describes the assignment of PITCH ACCENT in NewSpeak, an interface to the Bell Laboratories Text-to-Speech System, which infers limited discourse-level information, including given/new distinctions, and some information on focus, topic and contrast, along with improved part-of-speech distinctions, to assign intonational features for unrestricted text.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hirschberg, Julia (1990): "Using discourse context to guide pitch accent decisions in synthetic speech", In SSW1-1990, 181-184.