Facta universitatis - series: Electronics and Energetics 2014 Volume 27, Issue 3, Pages: 467-477
https://doi.org/10.2298/FUEE1403467P
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Automatic prosody generation in a text-to-speech system for Hebrew
Popović Branislav 
(Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad)
Knežević Dragan (Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad)
Sečujski Milan (Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad)
Pekar Darko (AlfaNum - Speech Technologies, Novi Sad)
The paper presents the module for automatic prosody generation within a
system for automatic synthesis of high-quality speech based on arbitrary text
in Hebrew. The high quality of synthesis is due to the high accuracy of
automatic prosody generation, enabling the introduction of elements of
natural sentence prosody of Hebrew. Automatic morphological annotation of
text is based on the application of an expert algorithm relying on
transformational rules. Syntactic-prosodic parsing is also rule based, while
the generation of the acoustic representation of prosodic features is based
on classification and regression trees. A tree structure generated during the
training phase enables accurate prediction of the acoustic representatives of
prosody, namely, durations of phonetic segments as well as temporal evolution
of fundamental frequency and energy. Such an approach to automatic prosody
generation has lead to an improvement in the quality of synthesized speech,
as confirmed by listening tests.
Keywords: speech synthesis, speech processing, natural language processing, classification and regression trees
Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike
Srbije, br. TR 32035