Generating F0 contours from toBI labels using linear regression

要旨

This paper describes a method for generating F 0 contours from ToBI labelled utterances. The method uses linear regression to predict F 0 target values for the start, mid-vowel and end of every syllable, using features representing the ToBI labels, stress and syllable position. Contours generated by this method for an English database have a correlation of 0.62 and 34.8 Hz RMS error when compared with originals from test data. These results are significant improvements on a previous rule driven method (0.40 and 44.7), and the new method contours are preferred by human listeners. The technique has also been successfully applied to Japanese ToBI with similar improvements. 1. INTRODUCTION One problem in the process of synthesizing natural sounding speech is the prediction of an F 0 contour which adequately reflects the desired prosodic tune. In most synthesizers the task of generating a prosodic tune consists of two sub-tasks, the prediction of intonation labels (accents, tones, etc) fr...

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