Exemplar-based pitch contour generation using DOP for syntactic tree decomposition

The generation of a pitch contour from linguistic information has long been recognised as a requirement for natural sounding speech synthesis. This paper investigates the use of an exemplar-based model for pitch contour generation. The main drawbacks of previous unit selection-based approaches for pitch contour generation is determining the size of the unit, and to guarantee that only prosodic and linguistically related units will be selected. The work presented in this paper overcomes these drawbacks by using only prosodic-syntactic correlated data, and a dynamic unit size model using data-oriented parsing. An AB comparison perceptual test showed 58% preference for the exemplar-based model, 25% for a HTS model, and 17% find both the same in terms of naturalness and pitch. In a MOS test, exemplar-based model achieved higher scores than that the HTS model achieved.