Third ESCA/COCOSDA Workshop on Speech Synthesis November 26-29, 1998 Jenolan Caves House, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

Modeling Phone Duration: Application to Catalan TTS

Albert Febrer, Jaume Padrell, Antonio Bonafonte

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

There are many exhaustive works that deal with the use of models for segmental duration. The aim of this paper is to evaluate some of the properties mentioned in literature and evaluate factorial and sum-of-products models in front of a listlike approach for Catalan language as a base for a most exhaustive study on duration in this language. Sum-of-products models for vowels and subsystems of consonants seem to be more adequate to model phone duration. The parameters for the sum-of-products models are presented in the paper. stress, phrasal position, surrounding phones, syllable length and syllable position.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Febrer, Albert / Padrell, Jaume / Bonafonte, Antonio (1998): "Modeling Phone Duration: Application to Catalan TTS", In SSW3-1998, 43-46.