• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.143-169
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• 2000

This chapter presents an overview of Korean intonational structure and proposes a revised version of K -ToBI (Korean TOnes and Break Indices), a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. In the new version of K-ToBI, a tone tier is separated into two tiers: a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels tones marking the prosodic structure of an utterance, and a phonetic tone tier labels individual tones of an AP and an IP conforming to the surface pitch contour. Labelling surface tonal patterns will provide us data to test the underlying tonal patterns and to build phonetic implementation rules.

• MALSORI
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• no.53
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• pp.75-92
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• 2005

Prosody Generation Based on C-ToBI Representation for Text-to-SpeechSeungwon Kim, Yu Zheng, Gary Geunbae Lee, Byeongchang KimProsody modeling is critical in developing text-to-speech (TTS) systems where speech synthesis is used to automatically generate natural speech. In this paper, we present a prosody generation architecture based on Chinese Tone and Break Index (C-ToBI) representation. ToBI is a multi-tier representation system based on linguistic knowledge to transcribe events in an utterance. The TTS system which adopts ToBI as an intermediate representation is known to exhibit higher flexibility, modularity and domain/task portability compared with the direct prosody generation TTS systems. However, the cost of corpus preparation is very expensive for practical-level performance because the ToBI labeled corpus has been manually constructed by many prosody experts and normally requires a large amount of data for accurate statistical prosody modeling. This paper proposes a new method which transcribes the C-ToBI labels automatically in Chinese speech. We model Chinese prosody generation as a classification problem and apply conditional Maximum Entropy (ME) classification to this problem. We empirically verify the usefulness of various natural language and phonology features to make well-integrated features for ME framework.