PROSODY CONTROL BASED ON SYNTACTIC INFORMATION IN KOREAN TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERSION SYSTEM

Text-to-Speech(TTS) conversion system can convert any words or sentences into speech. To synthesize the speech like human beings do, careful prosody control including intonation, duration, accent, and pause is required. It helps listeners to understand the speech clearly and makes the speech sound more natural. In this paper, a prosody control scheme which makes use of the information of the function word is proposed. Among many factors of prosody, intonation, duration, and pause are closely related to syntactic structure, and their relations have been formalized and embodied in TTS. To evaluate the synthesized speech with the proposed prosody control, one of the subjective evaluation methods-MOS(Mean Opinion Score) method has been used. Synthesized speech has been tested on 10 listeners and each listener scored the speech between 1 and 5. Through the evaluation experiments, it is observed that the proposed prosody control helps TTS system synthesize the more natural speech.