Research on Synthesis Method for Spoken Sentences from Knowledge Representation

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With the aim of constructing a speech output system which converts machine readable knowledge representation into continuous speech, this projects includes the studies on the generation of concept representation, linguistic representation, phone and prosodic symbols, speech waveform, and the construction of the total system. The project was almost fully performed and following results were obtained.1. The study was performed to realize a question answer system which selects necessary information for the users from the knowledge base.2. The introduction of the dialogue control process to the system was shown to be effective for precisely extracting necessary information for the users, for realizing smoother interface between the system and the user, for generating elliptical/pronominal representation, and for controlling focal condition.3. A method was developed to construct deep level semantic representation, which is basically case structure, from the knowledge representation extracte … More d by the above procedure. A program was also constructed and realized on the computer which generates surface level sentences from this semantic representation.4. A method was developed and realized on the computer which represents syntactic structure using terms of sentence boundary, concatenated clause boundary, clause boundary, and ICRLB (immediate constituent with recursively left-branching structure) boundary, and discourse structure using three-level indices of importance of the prosodic words. This method further generates phone and prosodic symbols from the syntactic and discourse information, and grammatical property and accent type of the prosodic word.5. A new type of terminal analog speech synthesizer was developed and constructed on the computer which consists of four separate cascade paths simulating the vocal transfer functions of the four different speech categories and three types of excitation sources, viz., glottal waveform, fricative noise and plosive noise.6. Syllable templates for above mentioned speech synthesizer were constructed for all possible Japanese syllables based on the results of analysis of natural speech. A program was also constructed which concatenates stored syllable templates and produces temporal pattern of feature parameters of continuous speech.7. The above results were summarized to produce a total speech output system and its validity was proved by the listening test of synthesized speech. Less