Corpus-based Generation of F0 contours of Japanese based on the Generation Process Model and its Control for Prosodic Focus

A total corpus-based process of generating prosodic features form text is developed. The process first predicts pauses and phone durations, and then generates F0 contours. Since F0 contour generation is based on the generation process model, it is rather easy to manipulate the generated F0 contours in command level. A method was developed for generating sentence F0 contours, when a focus is placed in one of “bunsetsu” of an utterance. The method is to predict differences in the F0 model commands between with and without focus utterances, and applies them to the F0 model commands predicted beforehand by the baseline method. The validity of the method was proved by the experiment on F0 contour generation and speech synthesis.