Significance of word-terminal syllables for prediction of phrase breaks in text-to-speech systems for Indian languages

Phrase break prediction is very important for speech synthesis. Traditional methods of phrase break prediction have used linguistic resources like part-of-speech (POS) sequence information for modeling these breaks. In the context of Indian languages, we propose to look at syllable level features and explore the use of word-terminal syllables to model phrase breaks. We hypothesize that these terminal syllables serve to discriminate words based on syntactic meaning, and can therefore be used to model phrase breaks. We utilize these terminal syllables in building models for automatic phrase break prediction from text and demonstrate by means of objective and subjective measures that these models perform as well as traditional models using POS sequence information. Thus the proposed method avoids the need for POS taggers for prosodic phrasing in Indian languages.