Pause insertion based on a morphosyntactic parser for Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech systems

Author

Seara, I.C. ; Kafka, S.G. ; Seara, Rui ; Klein, Sylke ; Pacheco, F.S. ; Seara, Rui

Author_Institution

Fed. Univ. of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis

fYear

2006

fDate

3-6 Sept. 2006

Firstpage

718

Lastpage

722

Abstract

Based on a morphosyntactic parser a set of rules for inserting silence pauses in synthesized sentences coming from a Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech (TTS) system is proposed. Such rules are determined as a function of the morphological class of words that compose the synthesized sentence, aiming to improve the TTS prosody. In order to assess the quality of the synthesized speech before and after inserting silence pauses, comparison category rating (CCR) listening tests are accomplished. Comparison mean opinion score (CMOS) results point out a considerable improvement in speech naturalness.

Keywords

computational linguistics; grammars; natural language processing; speech processing; speech synthesis; Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech synthesis system; comparison category rating listening test; comparison mean opinion score; morphosyntactic parser; silence pause insertion; speech naturalness improvement; Databases; Libraries; Natural languages; Speech analysis; Speech synthesis; Testing; Morphosyntactic parser; naturalness; pause insertion; prosody; speech synthesis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Telecommunications Symposium, 2006 International

Conference_Location

Fortaleza, Ceara

Print_ISBN

978-85-89748-04-9

Electronic_ISBN

978-85-89748-04-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ITS.2006.4433366

Filename

4433366