Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of producing synthetic speech for an interpreted dialogue where the attitudinal colouring of an original utterance is to be preserved; it describes differences in speaking style between read and spontaneous speech from the viewpoint of synthesis research and discusses the design of a synthesis system incorporating labels to encode the prosodic and segmental variation simultaneously. Spontaneous speech confronts us with phenomena that were not encountered in corpora of prepared or read speech, and to account for these we have to identify increasingly higher-level factors of discourse structure and speaker involvement. The paper makes three specific claims: (a) that it is better to label the distinctive characteristics of speech through higher-level context dependencies, and to select units for synthesis from appropriate contexts, rather than attempt to predict and modify fine phonetic detail; (b) that the labelling of segmental and prosodic characteristics can be done adequately for speech synthesis using automatic techniques, leaving the human labeller free to identify higher-level discourse-related aspects of the speech; and (c) that instead of minimizing the size of the source database of speech units, we should rather be concerned to maximize its variety and to efficiently select from it the units that most closely express the characteristics of the target speech. The CHATR resynthesis toolkit performs many of these tasks.
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Campbell, W.N. (1997). Synthesizing Spontaneous Speech. In: Sagisaka, Y., Campbell, N., Higuchi, N. (eds) Computing Prosody. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_12
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