Prosodic phrasing in korean, determine governor, and then split or not

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in textto-speech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language processing procedure, such as POS tagging and parsing, since syntactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with other factors. In this paper, the prosodic phrasing procedure is treated from two perspectives: dependency parsing and prosodic phrasing using dependency relations. This is appropriate for Ural-Altaic, since a prosodic boundary in speech usually concurs with a governor of dependency relation. From experimental results, using the proposed method achieved 12% improvement in prosody boundary prediction accuracy with a speech corpus consisting 300 sentences uttered by 3 speakers.