Segmental Duration Modeling for Greek Speech Synthesis

In this paper we cope with the task of modeling phoneme duration for Greek speech synthesis. In particular we apply well established machine learning approaches to the WCL-1 prosodic database for predicting segmental durations from shallow morphosyntactic and prosodic features. We employ decision trees, instance based learning and linear regression. Trained on a 5500 word database, both CART and linear regression models proved to be the most effective in terms for the task with a root mean square error off 0. 0252 and 0.0251 respectively.