| title: | The correspondence between sentence syntactic and prosodic characteristics in speech synthesis |
|---|---|
| reg no: | ETF5039 |
| project type: | Estonian Science Foundation research grant |
| subject: |
6.3. Linguistics |
| status: | completed |
| institution: | Institute of Estonian Language |
| head of project: | Hille Pajupuu |
| duration: | 01.01.2002 - 31.12.2005 |
| description: | .During 1997-2000 a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Estonian language was developed, sponsored by the Estonian Science Foundation. Public application of text-to-speech synthesis is, however, limited for the time being by the monotony and poor coherence of speech output. The naturalness of output speech and the variety of melody contours depends on the so-called prosodic generator to control the duration of speech units and pitch alteration in time. The existing system of text-to-speech synthesis uses a morphological analyser. For sentence prosody, only simple models with punctuation marks have been used. The inner structure of the sentence (syntax) has not been considered. The principal aim of this Project is to find those syntactic features that account for sentence prosody, which would enable the generation of natural text sentences with a neutral intonation from a written input text. The basic scientific result should be a systematic survey of Estonian sentence prosody, which has not been described this far. The main result of the study, which is the achievement of close-to-natural quality in text-to-speech synthesis, depends directly on the basic result. The pursued Project is absolutely necessary, if we are at all interested in the sustainability of the Estonian community and legal preservation of an Estonian linguistic environment. Considering the ever growing scope of computerized services without human mediation, and the most topical computer applications the results of the Project should become applicable - with time - in all spheres of everyday life, as communication with the computer changes from written to oral.. |
| project group | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | name | institution | position | |
| 1. | Krista Kerge | Tallinn Univ. of Educat. Scs-s | Ph.D. studies | |
| 2. | Meelis Mihkla | Inst of the Est Language | Assistant director | |
| 3. | Hille Pajupuu | Institute of the Estonian Language | Scientific Secretary | |