Generating responses that take user preferences into account requires adaptation at all levels of the generation process. This article describes a multi-level approach to presenting user-tailored information in spoken dialogues which brings together for the first time multi-attribute decision models, strategic content planning, surface realization that incorporates prosody prediction, and unit ...

This paper investigates the practical limits of artificially increasing the prosodic richness of a unit selection database by transforming the prosodic realization of constituent sentences. The resulting high-quality transformed sentences are added to the database as new material. We examine in detail one of the most challenging prosodic transformations, namely converting statements into yes/no...

The present study investigated prosodic realization of focus in statement and yes/no question in Tibetan (Lhasa dialect). Two target sentences were uttered by 8 speakers in both statement and yes/no question under four focus conditions, initial, medial, final and neutral focus. Systematic acoustic analysis showed that: (1) On-focus words exhibited significant F0 rising, pitch range expansion, a...

In this paper, I investigate the role of the mora in providing an adequate account of wordinternal prosodic organization and its phonetic realization. I review several phonological arguments in favor of the mora, including the cross-linguistic pervasiveness of two-way weight contrasts, observed onset/rime asymmetries, the representation of weight bearing geminates vs. “doubled consonants”, and ...

This study examined the perception of linguistic prosody from augmented point-light displays that were derived from motion tracking six talkers producing different prosodic contrasts. In Experiment 1, we determined perceivers’ ability to use these abstract visual displays to match prosody across modalities (audio to video), when the non-matching visual display was segmentally identical and diff...

Prosodic structure has been assumed to serve as a frame for articulation, so that phonetic shaping of abstract phonological representations is fine-tuned as a function of the prosodic system of the language. The intricate relationship between phonetics and prosodic structure has been explored in the literature under the rubric of the phonetics-prosody interface. This paper reviews various aspec...

We propose a set of rules for the computation of prosody which are implemented in an existing generic Data-to-Speech system. The rules make crucial use of both sentence-internal and sentence-external semantic and syntactic information provided by the system. In a Text-toSpeech system, this information would have to be obtained through text analysis, but in Data-to-Speech it is readily available...