Version 1
: Received: 16 February 2018 / Approved: 16 February 2018 / Online: 16 February 2018 (15:39:58 CET)
How to cite:
Chiang, C.; Hung, Y.; Yeh, H.; Liao, I.; Pan, C. Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation. Preprints2018, 2018020108. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201802.0108.v1
Chiang, C.; Hung, Y.; Yeh, H.; Liao, I.; Pan, C. Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation. Preprints 2018, 2018020108. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201802.0108.v1
Chiang, C.; Hung, Y.; Yeh, H.; Liao, I.; Pan, C. Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation. Preprints2018, 2018020108. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201802.0108.v1
APA Style
Chiang, C., Hung, Y., Yeh, H., Liao, I., & Pan, C. (2018). Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201802.0108.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Chiang, C., I-Bin Liao and Chen-Ming Pan. 2018 "Punctuation Generation Inspired Linguistic Features for Mandarin Prosody Generation" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201802.0108.v1
Abstract
This paper proposes two fully-automatic machine-extracted linguistic features from an unlimited text input for Mandarin prosody generation. One is the punctuation confidence (PC) which measures the likelihood of inserting a major punctuation mark (PM) at a word boundary. Another is the quotation confidence (QC) which measures the likelihood of a word string to be quoted as a meaningful or emphasized unit in text. Because a major PM in a text is highly correlated with a prosodic break, and a quoted word string plays an important role in human language understanding, the two features potentially could provide useful information for prosody generation. The idea is first realized by employing conditional random field (CRF)-based models to predict major PMs, quoted word string locations, and their associated confidences, i.e., the PC and the QC, for each word boundary. Then, the predicted punctuations and their confidences are combined with traditional contextual linguistic features to predict prosodic-acoustic features. Both objective and subjective tests showed that the prosody generation with the proposed linguistic features performed better than the one without the proposed features. So, the proposed PC and QC are promising features for Mandarin prosody generation.
Keywords
Mandarin; prosody generation; linguistic feature; break prediction; text-to-speech; punctuation confidence
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Information Systems
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.