Text chunking for prosodic phrasing in French

In this paper, we describe experiments in text chunking for prosodic phrasing and generation in French. We present a quick, robust and deterministic parser which uses part-of-speech information and a set of rules, to consistently assign prosodic boundaries in Text-To-Speech synthesis. The syntactic phrasing, consisting of segmenting sentences in non-recursive sequences, is de ned in terms of sets of possible categories. The syntax-prosody interface is presented: the sequences enable the location of potential prosodic boundaries (minor, major or intermediate). The rst results are given, including of a listening test, which demonstrated the advantage of our chunk grammar over a simpler approach, based on function words and punctuation. Quantitative measures are made on the chunks de ned between boundaries. Our model prefers structural criteria to probabilities, and an approach by intension rather than by extension, is also compared with other models.

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