Prediction of Prosodic Organization Based on Grammatical Information

It is especially necessary to generate prosody automatically in a Chinese TTS system. The main task is to segment the Chinese character sequence into proper speech units and organize them as a prosodic hierarchy. This goal can be satisfied by inserting different strength of breaks and assigning certain degree of stresses within a sentence. This paper will discuss how to predict the location and strength of break and stress based on syntactic and lexical information extracted from text analysis. Our attention will be paid to following aspects: (1)a brief description on Chinese prosody; (2)text analysis; (3)predictive-tree building; (4)break index prediction; (5)stress index prediction.