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

Correlating Text with Prosody

Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Julie Carson-Berndsen

University College Dublin, Ireland

The prediction of prosody from text information has long been recognised as a requirement for natural sounding speech synthesis. While an examination of the relationship between text information and prosody typically focuses on the role of accent, duration and phrasing both from a statistical and rule-based perspective, this paper investigates the correlation between the similarities calculated with respect to text information and those calculated with respect to prosody from an exemplar-based perspective. Two text features are examined, the syntactic tree and the dependency tree, along with two prosody features, pitch and intensity. The work in this paper investigates 1) the correlation between text information and prosody information 2) the conditional membership probability between text information and prosodic information, and 3) the effect of the number of exemplars on the conditional membership probability.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Abou-Zleikha, Mohamed / Carson-Berndsen, Julie (2011): "Correlating text with prosody", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2185-2188.