Hierarchical prosodic boundary prediction for Uyghur TTS

Correct prosodic boundary prediction is crucial for the quality of synthesized speech. This paper presents the prosodic hierarchy of Uyghur-language which belongs to agglutinative language. A two-layer bottom-up hierarchical approach based on conditional random fields (CRF) is used for predicting prosodic word (PW) and prosodic phrase (PP) boundaries. In order to disambiguate the confusion between different prosodic boundaries at punctuation sites, CRF based prosodic boundary determination model is used and integrated with bottom-up hierarchical approach. Word suffix feature is considered useful for prosodic boundary prediction and added into the feature sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method successfully resolves the confusion between different prosodic boundaries. Consequently, further enhance the accuracy of prosodic boundary prediction.