ISCA Archive - Assessment of intonation in text-to-speech synthesis systems (original) (raw)

Assessment of intonation in text-to-speech synthesis systems - a pilot test in English and Italian

Martine Griee, Kiki Vagges, Daniel Hirst

Tests of prosodic form are seen as the first stage of a programme to evaluate the quality of intonation algorithms in text-to-speech synthesis. Before we can assess the functional appropriateness of an intonation contour , we must first assess whether the synthesiser's realisation of this contour is adequate. A pilot test to evaluate the realisation of falls and rises over stretches of differing segmental complexity was carried out in English and Italian. For each segmental context, scores for these two contours were calculated relative to the monotone realisation. Keywords: Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Speech Output, Assessment, Intonation, Prosody