A prosodic control module for a Romanian TtS system, based on melodic contour dictionaries

This paper presents a prosodic control module implementation for a Romanian TTS system based on the F0 contour generation as a sequence of functional elementary melodic contours. The accentual units (AUs) are considered as elementary melodic contours because they contain elementary tonal contrasts to which labels with discourse signification may be assigned. Based on this idea, a set of AU F0 pattern categories was defined after performing an analysis over a Romanian speech corpus. The dictionary containing the parametric descriptions of the AU F0 pattern types in all possible lexical and phonetic contexts is an important resource in the prosodic control module. Another important resource is the dictionary containing the functional descriptions of the partial melodic contours at different intonational phrase (IP) or AU group (AUG) levels. After the intonational model and the label set presentation, we exemplify how our intonational description can be used to annotate the F0 contour. In the next section, the processing steps of the prosodic control module is presented.