Title :
Pause insertion based on a morphosyntactic parser for Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech systems
Author :
Seara, I.C. ; Kafka, S.G. ; Seara, Rui ; Klein, Sylke ; Pacheco, F.S. ; Seara, Rui
Author_Institution :
Fed. Univ. of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis
Abstract :
Based on a morphosyntactic parser a set of rules for inserting silence pauses in synthesized sentences coming from a Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech (TTS) system is proposed. Such rules are determined as a function of the morphological class of words that compose the synthesized sentence, aiming to improve the TTS prosody. In order to assess the quality of the synthesized speech before and after inserting silence pauses, comparison category rating (CCR) listening tests are accomplished. Comparison mean opinion score (CMOS) results point out a considerable improvement in speech naturalness.
Keywords :
computational linguistics; grammars; natural language processing; speech processing; speech synthesis; Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech synthesis system; comparison category rating listening test; comparison mean opinion score; morphosyntactic parser; silence pause insertion; speech naturalness improvement; Databases; Libraries; Natural languages; Speech analysis; Speech synthesis; Testing; Morphosyntactic parser; naturalness; pause insertion; prosody; speech synthesis;
Conference_Titel :
Telecommunications Symposium, 2006 International
Conference_Location :
Fortaleza, Ceara
Print_ISBN :
978-85-89748-04-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-85-89748-04-9
DOI :
10.1109/ITS.2006.4433366
