Aspects of a Romanian syntactic-prosodic interface for an intonation prediction module

This paper presents an improved version of a previously developed prosodic prediction module (PPM), used by a Romanian TtS (Text-to-Speech) system in intonation synthesis. The present PPM implements a method for setting prosodic indications, useful both in generating prosodic hierarchies and in melodic contour selection at each group level. The prosodic indications are derived from the lexical and morpho-syntactic analysis of the input text. The text analysis aims to generate a text structure by using only trees with one head and one or two branches, which describe local or global relations between words and/or group of words. This text hierarchy can be easily translated by the PPM into a prosodic hierarchy. Then, the elements of the relations are connected to different functional F0 patterns by selecting appropriate melodic contours, based on prosodicindications.