To the end of improving the naturalness of the intonation generated by a text-to-speech system for Italian, a syntactico-prosodic pre-processor has been devised, inserting prosodic markers at syntactic boundaries in the input text. The relations between syntax and prosody, to be exploited by the system, are being investigated on a speech data base obtained by digital recording of a carefully designed corpus of sentences read by a professional speaker. First results concern the duration and position of breathing pauses, correlated to sentence syntactic structure, A prototype of the syntactico-prosodic parser has been implemented and tested on written texts.
Cite as: Quazza, S., Varese, G., Vivalda, E. (1989) Syntactic pre-processing for high quality text-to-speech. Proc. First European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1989), 1506-1509, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1989-105
@inproceedings{quazza89_eurospeech,
author={S. Quazza and G. Varese and E. Vivalda},
title={{Syntactic pre-processing for high quality text-to-speech}},
year=1989,
booktitle={Proc. First European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1989)},
pages={1506--1509},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1989-105}
}