- 著者
-
Nobuaki MINEMATSU
Ryuji KITA
Keikichi HIROSE
- 出版者
- The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
- 雑誌
- IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.E86-D, no.3, pp.550-557, 2003-03-01
Accurate estimation of accentual attribute values of words, which is required to apply rules of Japanese word accent sandhi to prosody generation, is an important factor to realize high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. The rules were already formulated by Sagisaka et al. and are widely used in Japanese TTS conversion systems. Application of these rules, however, requires values of a few accentual attributes of each constituent word of input text. The attribute values cannot be found in any public database or any accent dictionaries of Japanese. Further, these values are difficult even for native speakers of Japanese to estimate only with their introspective consideration of properties of their mother tongue. In this paper, an algorithm was proposed, where these values were automatically estimated from a large amount of data of accent types of accentual phrases, which were collected through a long series of listening experiments. In the proposed algorithm, inter-speaker differences of knowledge of accent sandhi were well considered. To improve the coverage of the estimated values over the obtained data, the rules were tentatively modified. Evaluation experiments using two-mora accentual phrases showed the high validity of the estimated values and the modified rules and also some defects caused by varieties of linguistic expressions of Japanese.