Global F0 control parameter prediction based on impressions for communicative prosody generation

Aiming at communicative speech synthesis, prosody control using impressions has been proposed by applying the correlation between impressions of input lexicons and prosody. In this paper, as the first step to compute communicative prosody, we attempt to predict the F0 generation model parameters by estimating the impressions of input sentence from its constituent lexicons. To obtain an impression vector consisting of three dimensional factors (positive-negative, confident-doubtful and allowable-unacceptable) for a given input utterance, we proposed a computational scheme to calculate impression vectors using impression scores of constituent words. Using obtained sentence impression vectors, F0 control parameters are predicted by applying three-layered feed-forward neural networks. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed computational framework, we experimentally confirmed that F0 parameters of communicative speech could be generated from the impressions of input lexicons.