INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Applying the Quantitative Target Approximation Model (qTA) to German and Brazilian Portuguese

Plínio A. Barbosa (1), Hansjörg Mixdorff (2), Sandra Madureira (3)

(1) Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
(2) Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin, Germany
(3) Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil

This work is an attempt to explore a different prosodic domain for the quantitative target approximation model (qTA) model than the syllable. This is done by studying the model's ability to synthesise the melodic contours of two different languages, German and Brazilian Portuguese, in two distinct speaking styles, reading and storytelling. The connected utterances studied here present more complex material than hitherto studied using the qTA model. However, the modelling accuracy on these data is similar to that of the Fujisaki model. The results show that the word can be the domain for both prominence marking and phrase boundary type (terminal and non-terminal). By restricting the qTA parameter search space for the two mentioned functions, it is possible to develop an encoding scheme for them.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Barbosa, Plínio A. / Mixdorff, Hansjörg / Madureira, Sandra (2011): "Applying the quantitative target approximation model (qTA) to German and brazilian portuguese", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2025-2028.