Rule-Synthesis of Spoken Sentences for the Speech Dialogue Systems

该项目的组织目的是建立一种技术，用于按规则合成具有高自然韵律的高质量语音，作为对以适合计算机处理的知识表示（深层语义表示）形式提供的问题的回答。韵律的自然度可以通过考虑整个话语的语言信息来获得。具体来说，构建了包含对话处理和语音合成部分的语音响应系统，作为语音对话系统中输出生成的主要组成部分。以下结果表明该项目达到了最初的目标： 1．选择滑雪场引导作为语音响应系统的主题后，利用商用数据库构建了系统的必要元素——词典和知识库。2．对话处理的规则分为两组，对话流的一般规则和取决于主题和任务的特定规则。每个主题相关规则都是基于每个对话样本构建的。 3．基于以上结果，开发了对话处理系统并检查了其运行情况。结果表明，通过引入主题相关规则，仅利用输入语音中相关单词的信息就可以生成响应，并且可以通过参考先前使用的主题相关规则来相当容易地补偿输入语音中的省略号和照应词。主题相关规则的优点还表现在规则的添加和修改的容易性上。 4．开发了一种根据对话处理获得的响应内容生成表面句子的方法。响应内容以格结构表示的列表形式表示，表层句子通过添加助词和谓语共轭生成。在句子生成过程中，还利用语言信息生成音素和韵律符号。 5．分析了伪对话语音的韵律特征。根据结果​​，修改先前开发的朗读语音的韵律规则以产生对话语音的韵律规则。这些规则包括焦点控制。6．将上述结果与已经开发的语音合成系统相结合，构建了一个用于合成语音响应的系统。进行了听力测试，验证了系统的有效性。还开发了语音合成器来提高语音质量。较少的

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