Assigning phrase accent to Chinese Text-to-Speech system

This paper mainly solves the problem of phrase accent placement for Chinese Text-to-Speech (TIS) systems. Part-of-speech, prosodic boundary, word position, word unigram score and TF-IDF weight are employed in two speech corpus training by CART, which achieved the 80.01% and 77.15% of accuracy on testing data respectively. A perceptual experiment is designed to evaluate the phrase accent assignment. The result shows that it is important to assign phrase accent for Chinese ITS systems from the perceptual point of view, and that the performance of our automatic method is close to the manually annotation