A novel syllable duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech

In this paper, a novel syllable duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several main affecting factors as multiplicative companding parameters and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. Experimental results show that the variance of the observed syllable duration is greatly reduced from 183.4 frame² (1 frame=5 ms) to 18.5 frame² by eliminating effects from these affecting factors. Besides, the estimated companding values of these affecting factors agree well with our prior linguistic knowledge. A preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS is also performed. Experimental results show that it outperforms the conventional regressive prediction method. Lastly, an extension of the approach to incorporate initial and final duration modeling is presented. This leads to a better understanding of the relation between the companding factors of initial and final duration models and those of syllable duration model