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

Pauses Location and Duration Calculated with Syntactic Dependencies and Textual Considerations for TTS System

Gérald Vannier (1), Anne Lacheret-Dujour (2), Jacques Vergne (1)

(1) GREYC University of Caen, France; (2) ELSAP University of Caen, France

Punctuation is essential in predicting pauses in text-to-speech systems, but it is not sufficient. When reading, silences may be produced without any graphemic indication in the text. In this communication, we offer to introduce a method to calculate pauses occurences and durations according first, to textual constraints and second, to syntactic dependencies. We present the role of textual hierarchy for pauses durations and the importance of the syntactic relations from automatic syntactic analysis which allow to indicate pauses locations and durations inside sentences. Results of reported work are implemented in a retailed French text-to-speech system.

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Bibliographic reference.  Vannier, Gérald / Lacheret-Dujour, Anne / Vergne, Jacques (1999): "Pauses location and duration calculated with syntactic dependencies and textual considerations for TTS system", In ICPhS-14, 1569-1572.