Speech Generation for Human-Computer Interaction

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The goal of this project is to increase effectiveness of human-computer communication by improving the quality of automatically generated speech. Using the known linguistic structure that is a by-product of text generation, the research investigates both utterance-level and dialog-level control of prosody (i.e. phrasing, emphasis and intonation) i n a commercial synthesizer. The approach -- development of statistical models of the mapping between meaning and prosodic structure -- is novel in its emphasis on automatic learning algorithms associated with the aim of portability to different task domains/generators. The research involves: collection and automatic prosodic labeling of `acted` speech in target task domains; use of generated syntactic, semantic and discourse annotation to drive prosodic control modules; investigation of the role of prosody in computer initiative, e.g. in clarification or error correction subdialogs; and development of evaluation protocols for assessing speech generation quality and its impact on human-computer interaction. The research will benefit existing spoken language interfaces by providing higher quality speech output and more flexibility for response generation, but it will also open up applications for human-computer interaction where a visual display is not available, e.g. in small devices, in telephone-based computer access or for persons who are visually impaired.