The pause duration prediction for Mandarin text-to-speech system

In this paper, we enter into detailed analysis on how the pause duration under different prosodic boundaries are affected by various contextual factors in natural speech. To get the correlation between them, the paper calculates the mean pause duration under different prosodic boundaries. The contextual factors investigated in this paper contains both linguistic features, such as boundary types, syllable tones of boundary sides, initial and final types etc, and acoustic features, such as pitch gap across the boundary. The paper makes experiments and discussion which reveals the influence of these factors on pause duration. Based on that, the paper creates a pause duration prediction model for Mandarin speech synthesis system. The model was proved to be able to generate high quality prosody output with the listening test.