Integrated approaches to prosodic word prediction for Chinese TTS

We focus on integrated prosodic word prediction for Chinese TTS. To avoid the problem of inconsistency between lexical words and prosodic words in Chinese, lexical word segmentation and prosodic word prediction are taken as one process instead of two independent tasks. Furthermore, two word-based approaches are proposed to drive this integrated prosodic word prediction: The first one follows the notion of lexicalized hidden Markov models, and the second one is borrowed from unknown word identification for Chinese. The results of our primary experiment show these integrated approaches are effective.