• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.159-165
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a new pre-selection of candidate units that is suitable for the unit selection based Japanese TTS system. General pre-selection method performed by calculating a context-dependent cost within IP (Intonation Phrase). Different from other languages, however. Japanese has an accent represented as the height of a relative pitch, and several words form a single accentual phrase. Also. the prosody in Japanese changes in accentual phrase units. By reflecting such prosodic change in pre-selection. the qualify of synthesized speech can be improved. Furthermore, by calculating a context-dependent cost within accentual phrase, synthesis speed can be improved than calculating within intonation phrase. The proposed method defines AP. analyzes AP in context and performs pre-selection using accentual phrase matching which calculates CCL (connected context length) of the Phoneme's candidates that should be synthesized in each accentual phrase. The baseline system used in the proposed method is VoiceText, which is a synthesizer of Voiceware. Evaluations were made on perceptual error (intonation error, concatenation mismatch error) and synthesis time. Experimental result showed that the proposed method improved the qualify of synthesized speech. as well as shortened the synthesis time.