A Macro-Prosodic Indications for a Romanian TtS System Based on the Functional Intonational Model

Abstract

This paper presents how macro-prosodic indications can be used within our TtS system in order to drive the prosody prediction module (PPM) in generating a target intonational contour for the synthesized utterance. The previous variant of the PPM generates melodic contour descriptions only using the implicit prosodic indications deduced from the text analysis. The explicit indications are edited in the input text window and refer to the group markers applied to a text to which can be assigned a focus attribute with an indication on its strength. It can be also assigned to a group an attribute of tonal prominence (related to the tonal level of the highest peak in the group). We called these indications the macro-prosodic indications. We also defined a microprosodic indication that refers to the pitch accent type attribute at the accentual unit level that is related to F0 contour pattern. The values of this attribute are taken from the Ro-ToBI label set. Both macro and microprosodic indications lead to elicit certain intonational variants at the speech synthesis output and also can improve the Romanian intonation contour understanding.