Francisco Campillo Díaz

A method for combining intonation modelling and speech unit selection in corpus-based speech synthesis systems

In this paper, we focus on improving the quality of corpus-based synthesis systems by considering several candidate intonation contours. These candidates are generated by a unit selection procedure for which cost functions are defined. The consideration of several possible pitch contours adds an additional degree of freedom to the search for appropriate speech units. Objective and subjective tests confirm an improvement in the quality of the resulting synthetic speech.

Integrating phrasing and intonation modelling using syntactic and morphosyntactic information

This paper focuses on the relationship between intonation and syntactic and morphosyntactic information. Although intonation and syntax are both related to dependencies between the different parts of a sentence, and are therefore related to meaning, the precise influence of grammar on intonation is not clear. We describe a novel method that uses syntactic and part-of-speech features in the framework of corpus-based intonation modelling, and which integrates part of the phrasing algorithm in the unit selection stage. Subjective tests confirm an improvement in the quality of the resulting synthetic intonation: 75% of the sentences synthesised with the new intonation model were considered to be better or much better than the sentences synthesised using the old model, while only 7.5% of sentences were rated as worse or much worse.

Specific features of the Galician language and implications for speech technology development

In this article, we present the main linguistic and phonetic features of Galician which need to be considered in the development of speech technology applications for this language. We also describe the solutions adopted in our text-to-speech system, also useful for speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. On the phonetic plane in particular, the handling of vocal contact and the determination of mid-vowel openness are discussed. On the linguistic plane we place special emphasis on the handling of clitics and verbs. It should be noted that in Galician there is high interrelation between phonetics and grammatical information. Therefore, the task of morphosyntactic disambiguation is also addressed. Moreover, this task is fundamental for a higher level linguistic analysis.