Rule-Synthesis of Spoken Sentences for the Speech Dialogue Systems

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This project was organized with the aim of establishing a technology for synthesizing by rule a high-quality speech with high-naturalness in prosody as a response to the question supplied in the form of knowledge representation (deep-level semantic representation) suitable for the computer processing. The naturalness in the prosody may be obtained by taking the linguistic information of the whole utterance into account. To be concrete, a speech response system of dialogue processing and speech synthesis parts was constructed as a major component for the output generation in the speech dialogue systems. Following results indicate the original goal of the project being attained.1. After selecting the guidance of the ski areas as the theme of the speech response system, a word dictionary and a knowledge base, necessary elements of the system, were constructed utilizing the commercially avail- able database.2. Rules for dialogue processing are divided into two groups, general rules for the … More dialogue flow and specific rules depending on the topics and tasks. Each of the topic dependent rules was constructed based on each of dialogue samples.3. Based on the above results, a system was developed for dialogue processing and its operation was checked. As the results, it was shown that, by introducing topic dependent rules, response generation is possible only with the information on the dependent words in the input speech, and that the ellipsis and the anaphora in the input speech can be compensated rather easily by referring to the topic dependent rules previously used. The advantage of the topic dependent rules was also shown to be the easiness in the addition and modification of the rules.4. A method was developed for generating surface sentences from the response content obtained by the dialogue processing. The response content is represented in the list form of case structure representation and the surface sentence is generated by adding particles and conjugating the predicates. During this process for sentence generation, phone and prosodic symbols are also generated using the linguistic information.5. Prosodic features were analyzed for the pseudo-dialogue speech. Based on the results, prosodic rules for the reading speech previously developed were modified to produce prosodic rules for the dialogue speech. These rules include the focus control.6. By combining the above results with the speech synthesis system already developed, a system was construct- ed for synthesizing speech response. Hearing test was conducted and the validity of the system was proved. A speech synthesizer was also developed to increase the speech quality. Less