A prosodic phrasing model for a Korean text-to-speech synthesis system

This paper presents a prosodic phrasing model for Korean to be used in a textto-speech synthesis (TTS) system. Read text corpora were morpho-syntactically parsed and prosodically labeled following the Penn Korean Treebank [Han et al., 2002] and K-ToBI prosodic labeling conventions [Sun-Ah, 2000] respectively. Decision trees were trained with morpho-syntactic and textual distance features to predict locations of accentual and intonational phrase breaks. Our phrasing model cross-validated on a 300-sentence corpus (6,936 words or 21,436 syllables, with an average of 72 syllables or 23 words per sentence) predicted non-breaks with F=92.4% and breaks with F=88.0% (F=72.8% for accentual phrase breaks and F=71.3% for intonational phrase breaks).