ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

Prosodic phrasing in korean, determine governor, and then split or not

Yeon-Jun Kim, Heo-Jin Byeon, Yung-Hwan Oh

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in text-tospeech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language pro-cessing procedure, such as POS tagging and parsing, since syn-tactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with other factors. In this paper, the prosodic phrasing procedure is treated from two perspectives: dependency parsing and prosodic phrasing using dependency relations. This is appropriate for Ural-Altaic, since a prosodic boundary in speech usually concurs with a gov-ernor of dependency relation. From experimental results, using the proposed method achieved 12% improvement in prosody boundary prediction accuracy with a speech corpus consisting 300 sentences uttered by 3 speakers.