• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.11
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• pp.837-844
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• 2010

Prediction of the prosodic phrase boundary is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. We propose, for the natural prediction of the Korean prosodic phrase boundary, a statistical approach incorporating efficient learning features. These new features reflect the factors that affect generation of the prosodic phrase boundary better than existing learning features. Notably, moreover, such learning features, extracted according to the hand-crafted prosodic phrase boundary prediction rule, impart higher accuracy. We developed a statistical model for Korean prosodic phrase boundaries based on the proposed new features. The results were 86.63% accuracy for three levels (major break, minor break, no break) and 81.14% accuracy for six levels (major break with falling tone/rising tone, minor break with falling tone/rising tone/middle tone, no break).

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2008

In this paper, we suggest a rule-based system for the prediction of natural prosodic phrase breaks from Korean texts. For the implementation of the rule-based system, (1) sentence constituents are sub-categorized according to their syntactic functions, (2) syntactic phrases are recognized using the dependency relations among sub-categorized constituents, (3) rules for predicting prosodic phrase breaks are created. In addition, (4) the length of syntactic phrases and sentences, the position of syntactic phrases in a sentence, sense information of contextual words have been considered as to determine the variable prosodic phrase breaks. Based on these rules and features, we obtained the accuracy over 90% in predicting the position of major break and no break which have high correlation with the syntactic structure of the sentence. As for the overall accuracy in predicting the whole prosodic phrase breaks, the suggested system shows Break_Correct of 87.18% and Juncture Correct of 89.27% which is higher than that of other models.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.155-163
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• 2009

In text-to-speech systems, the conversion of text into prosodic parameters is necessarily composed of three steps. These are the placement of prosodic boundaries. the determination of segmental durations, and the specification of fundamental frequency contours. Prosodic boundaries. as the most important and basic parameter. affect the estimation of durations and fundamental frequency. Break prediction is an important step in text-to-speech systems as break indices (BIs) have a great influence on how to correctly represent prosodic phrase boundaries, However. an accurate prediction is difficult since BIs are often chosen according to the meaning of a sentence or the reading style of the speaker. In Japanese, the prediction of an accentual phrase boundary (APB) and major phrase boundary (MPB) is particularly difficult. Thus, this paper presents a method to complement the prediction errors of an APB and MPB. First, we define a subtle BI in which it is difficult to decide between an APB and MPB clearly as a variable break (VB), and an explicit BI as a fixed break (FB). The VB is chosen using the classification and regression tree, and multiple prosodic targets in relation to the pith and duration are then generated. Finally. unit-selection is conducted using multiple prosodic targets. In the MOS test result. the original speech scored a 4,99. while proposed method scored a 4.25 and conventional method scored a 4.01. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the naturalness of synthesized speech.