An Example-based Approach for Prosody Generation in Chinese Speech Synthesis

Prosody generation is an important issue in text to speech system. We present in this paper an example-based approach for prosody generation in mandarin Chinese speech synthesis. The general idea is that we are trying to get the prosodic information from real speech examples. We first analyze given Chinese text, and form a linguistic feature vector, which describes the phonetic and lexicon characteristics of the text. Then we search a database to find the best match of the vector, which is a similar occurrence of the text. The prosody parameters of the searched example will be the guideline of the prosody we are going to generate. The method is a hierarchical approach. The final prosody is the combination of three elements, which are syllable level prosody, phrase level prosody pattern and sentence level prosody constraint. The experimental results showed that the proposed method generates relatively good prosody.