Focus to emphasize tone analysis for prosodic generation

Emphasizing prosody of a sentence at its focus part when producing a speaker’s utterance can improve the recognition rate to hearers and reduce its ambiguity. Our objective is to address this challenge by analysing the concept of foci in speech utterances and the relationship of focus, speaker’s intention and prosody. Our investigation is aimed at understanding and modelling how a speaker’s utterances are influenced by the speaker’s intentions. The relationship between speaker’s intentions and focus information is used to consider which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose using the Focus to Emphasize Tone (FET) analysis, which includes: (i) generating the constraints for foci, speaker’s intention and prosodic features, (ii) defining the intonation patterns, (iii) labelling a set of prosodic marks for a sentence. We also design the FET structure to support our analysis and to contain focus, speaker’s intention and prosodic components. An implementation of the system is described and the evaluation results on the CMU Communicator (CMU–COM) dataset are presented.