Generating Synthetic Pitch Contours Using Prosodic Structure.

This thesis addresses the problem of generating a range of natural sounding pitch contours for speech synthesis to convey the specific meanings of different intonation patterns. Where other models can synthesise intonation adequately for short sentences, longer sentences often sound unnatural as phrasing is only really considered at the sentence level. We build models within a framework of prosodic structure derived from the linguistic analysis of a corpus of speech. We show that the use of appropriate prosodic structure allows us to produce better contours for longer sentences and allows us to capture the original style of the corpus. The resulting model is also sufficiently flexible to be adapted to suitable styles for use in other domains. To convey specific meanings we need to be able to generate different accent types. We find that the infrequency of some accent and boundary types makes them hard to model from the corpus alone. We address this issue by developing a model which allows us to isolate the parameters which control specific accent type shapes, so that we can reestimate these parameters based on other data

Datenbasierte und linguistisch interpretierbare Intonationsmodellierung

In this thesis a data-driven and linguistically interpretable intonation model for the automatic analysis and synthesis of fundamental frequency (F0) contours was developed. The model can be characterised as parametric, contour-based, and superpositional. Its intonation representation consists of a superposition of global and local contour classes and can be derived in a purely data-driven manner, which guarantees consistency and easy adaptability to new data. The model's linguistic interpretability was examined by automatic linguistic corpus analyses resulting in hypotheses about possible relations between contours and linguistic concepts. These hypotheses were subsequently tested by perception experiments. By these means a systematic linguistic anchoring of the model was achieved in form of a decision tree to predict the linguistically appropriate contour class. The adequacy of its predictions was assured by a further perception test. Due to its simultaneous signal proximity and linguistic anchoring, the model covers the entire chain from text to signal and therefore can be used for intonation analysis and generation on a linguistic as well as on a phonetic-acoustic level. It is qualified for employment in speech technology applications as well as in phonetic fundamental research to automatically analyse raw speech data

Towards Entity Status

Discourse entities are an important construct in computational linguistics. They introduce an additional level of representation between referring expressions and that which they refer to: the level of mental representation. In this thesis, I first explore some semiotic and communication theoretic aspects of discourse entities. Then, I develop the concept of "entity status". Entity status is a meta-variable that collects two dimensions formations about the role that an entity plays a discourse, and management informations about how the entity is created, accessed, and updated. Finally, the concept is applied to two case studies: the first one focusses on the choice of referring expressions in radio news, while the second looks at the conditions under which a discourse entity can be mentioned as a pronoun.Diskursentitäten sind ein wichtiger Konstrukt in der Computerlinguistik. Sie führen eine zusätzliche Repräsentationsebene ein zwischen referierenden Ausdrücken, und dem, auf das diese Ausdrücke referieren: die Ebene der mentalen Repräsentation. In dieser Dissertation erkunde ich zunächst einige semiotische und kommunikationstheoretische Aspekte von Diskursentitäten. Danach führe ich den Begriff des "Entitätenstatus" ein. Entitätenstatus ist eine Meta-Variable, die zwei Dimensionen von Information über eine Diskursentität vereinigt: Struktur-Informationen über die Rolle, die eine Entität im Diskurs spielt, und Verwaltungs-Informationen über Erstellung, Zugriff und Update. Dieser Begriff wird schlussendlich auf zwei Fallstudien angewendet: die erste Studie konzentriert sich auf die Wahl referierender Ausdrücke in Radionachrichten, während die zweite Studie die Bedingungen untersucht, in denen eine Diskursentität als Pronomen erwähnt werden kann

Evaluating Radio News Intonation Autosegmental Versus Superpositional Modelling

This study examines prosodic correlates of the givenness of discourse entities in German radio news speech. The material comes from the Stuttgart Radio News Corpus. Both GToBI intonation labels and a Fujisaki-style parametrization of the intonation contour were examined. We find strong word-class specific accentuation defaults; the influence of entity status is rather small and varies with word class. However, there are strong influences of newness on phrasing. The results of autosegmental and superpositional approaches complement each other nicely. 1 INTRODUCTION In this study, we examine prosodic correlates of entity status in German radio news with respect to two intonation models, autosegmental--metrical and superpositional. The paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we introduce the concept of entity status and briefly review the two intonation models on which our results are based. Next, in Section 3, we describe the corpus and the annotations used in this study. The res..