Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modelling Prominence And Emphasis Improves Unit-Selection Synthesis, Volker Strom, Ani Nenkova, Robert Clark, Yolanda Vazquez-Alvarez, Jason Brenier, Simon King, Dan Jurafsky

Ani Nenkova

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cost and showed that listeners preferred these synthesised sentences. We also describe an improved recording script for collecting emphatic accents, and show that generating emphatic accents leads to further improvements in the fiction genre over incorporating pitch accent only. Finally, we show differences in the effects of prominence …