Variations prosodiques en synthèse par sélection d'unités: l'exemple des phrases interrogatives (Prosodic variations in unit-based speech synthesis: the example of interrogative sentences) [in French]

Prosodic variations in unit-based speech synthesis: the example of interrogative sentences This paper proposes an automatic method to increase the number of possible prosodic variations in non-uniform unit-based speech synthesis. More specifically, we are interested in the production of interrogative sentences through the eLite text-to-speech synthesis system, which relies on the selection of non-uniform units, but does not have interrogative units in its speech database. The purpose of this work was to make the system able to synthesize interrogative sentences without having to record a new, interrogative database. After a study of the syntactic and prosodic phenomena involved in the production of interrogative sentences, we present our two-step method: an adapted pre-processing of the unit selection itself, and a post-processing of the whole speech signal built by the system. A perceptual evaluation of sentences synthesized by our approach is then described, which points out both pros and cons of the method and highlights some issues in the very principles of the eLite system. MOTS-CLÉS : synthèse NUU, phrases interrogatives, variations prosodiques.