Prediction of F0 parameter of contextualized utterances in dialogue

In order to synthesize natural spoken dialogue, it is necessary to incorporate dialogue information into generation of the surface sentence and the prosody. The paper describes the prediction of the F0 maximum for minor phrases in dialogue based on a two-step predictive method. Special attention is directed to specific phrases containing the person´s name or the day of the week in a schedule arrangement task in order to narrow the diversity of characteristics of F0 parameters in dialogue. Seven features were identified as dialogue information which are useful to predict the F0 parameter. Two D-rule sets derived from the person´s name or the day of the week are very similar to one another. They reduce the total prediction errors by about 50% for the data which have much influence on dialogue context