Modeling incompletion phenomenon in Mandarin dialog prosody

The paper proposes a prosody generation method for dialog speech synthesis in Mandarin. The method is an extension of a prosody model for read speech and also takes the essential characteristic of dialog speech into account. Besides the faster speaking rate and narrower pitch range in dialog speech, our method concentrates on the more underlying and essential characteristic: the incompletion of pitch contour within a syllable and its impacts on adjacent syllables. To simulate this phenomenon, a CART-based method is constructed to predict whether a syllable is incomplete or not. Based on that, a prosody generation model which focuses on the prosody constraint between adjacent syllables is constructed, and this method can simulate the influence of incomplete syllable on adjacent syllables. Experiments show that the synthesized results based on that prosody model sound much natural and colloquial.