14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

On The Relative Importance Of Different Prosodic Factors for Improving Speech Synthesis

I. Bulyko (1), Mari Ostendorf (2), P. Price (2)

(1) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA; (2) SR] International, Mento Park, CA, USA

Wc present results of perceptual experiments geared toward assessing the relative importance of several prosodie factors in synthetic speech, showing that naturalness, relative to a target speaking style, can be significantly improved through both symbolic label prediction and better F₀ and duration generation. Our experiments utilized a novel perceptual experiment paradigm, where we supply each test subject with two reference utterances in order to obtain reliable absolute scores that indicate magnitude of improvement. The approach gives ratings that arc comparable across experiments. Results also show a strong interaction between detailed F₀ and duration controls.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bulyko, I. / Ostendorf, Mari / Price, P. (1999): "On the relative importance of different prosodic factors for improving speech synthesis", In ICPhS-14, 81-84.