Several grammar theories relate information structure and prosody, highlighting a major correspondence between theme and rheme, and intonation patterns. Although these theories have been successfully exploited in some specific speech synthesis applications, they are mainly based on short default-order sentences, which limits their expressiveness for real discourse with longer sentences and complex structures. This paper revises these theories, identifying cases in which they are valid, and providing a new proposal for cases in which a more complex model is needed. Specifically, our experiments performed on real discourse from the Wall Street Journal corpus show that we need a model that: (1) foresees a hierarchical theme/rheme structure, and (2) introduces, apart from the traditional theme and rheme, a new element—the specifier.
Cite as: Domínguez, M., Farrús, M., Burga, A., Wanner, L. (2014) The Information StructureProsody Language Interface Revisited. Proc. Speech Prosody 2014, 539-543, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-96
@inproceedings{dominguez14_speechprosody,
author={Mónica Domínguez and Mireia Farrús and Alicia Burga and Leo Wanner},
title={{The Information StructureProsody Language Interface Revisited}},
year=2014,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2014},
pages={539--543},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-96}
}