Computer Synthesis of Contextually Appropriate Intonation for Spoken Language

计算机合成适合口语语境的语调

• 批准号: 9018513
• 负责人: Mark Steedman
• 金额: $ 15.29万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1991
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1991-09-01 至 1994-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9018513&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Computer; Synthesis; Contextually; Appropriate; Intonation

The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their traditional surface- syntactic structure. The involvement of two apparently uncoupled levels of structure in Natural Language grammar appears to complicate the path form speech to interpretation unreasonably and to thereby threaten a number of computational unreasonably, and to thereby threaten a number of computational applications in speech recognition and speech synthesis. This work will complete the specification of a generative theory of intonation in relation to syntax and discourse function, and instantiate the theory by constructing a "discourse-model driven" utterance generator and speech synthesizer. Such a device is to be contrasted with "text-to-speech" generation. The input to the system will be a representation of discourse context characteristic of a simple natural language query system. On the basis of such representations, the system will be capable of constructing a variety of contextually appropriate intonation contours for any given sentence covered by its grammar. Such a device is expected to considerably improve comprehensibility and naturalness of the synthesized speech.

通过语调强加于口语句子的结构似乎经常与其传统的表层句法结构垂直。自然语言语法中两个明显不耦合的结构层次的参与似乎使从语音到不合理解释的路径复杂化，从而威胁到一些不合理的计算，从而威胁到语音识别和语音合成中的一些计算应用。这项工作将完成语调生成理论的句法和语篇功能的规范，并通过构建“语篇模型驱动”的话语生成器和语音合成器来实例化该理论。这样的设备将与“文本到语音”的生成形成对比。系统的输入将是简单自然语言查询系统的话语语境特征的表示。在这种表示的基础上，该系统将能够为其语法所涵盖的任何给定句子构建各种上下文适当的语调轮廓。这样的装置有望显著提高合成语音的可理解性和自然度。