Abstract
This paper presents an intonation description language based on the decomposition of complex intonational phrases (IP) into a tree of accentual units (AUs) and accentual unit group (AUGs) to which we have assigned functional labels at the communicative act level. A set of functional AU categories was defined and corresponding F0 contour patterns were described after performing an analysis over a Romanian speech corpus. Another important resource is the dictionary containing the descriptions of IPs/AUGs non-elementary melodic contours as functional unit sequences to which relative tonal coordinate sequences were assigned. We consider these functional labels suited to apply invariant meanings to different F0 contour units, structured into a functional unit hierarchy at the utterance level. We used the description language to perform flexible microprosodic descriptions of the text in a Romanian Text-to-Speech (TtS) system in order to control the F0 contour generation.
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Jitca, D., Apopei, V. & Jitca, M. The F0 contour modelling as functional accentual unit sequences. Int J Speech Technol 12, 75 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-009-9055-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-009-9055-3