Specifying Intonation From Context for Speech Synthesis

This paper presents a theory and a computational implementation for generating prosodically appropriate synthetic speech in response to database queries. Proper distinctions of contrast and emphasis are expressed in an intonation contour that is synthesized by rule under the control of a grammar, a discourse model, and a knowledge base. The theory is based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a formalism which easily integrates the notions of syntactic constituency, semantics, prosodic phrasing and information structure. Results from our current implementation demonstrate the system\u27s ability to generate a variety of intonational possibilities for a given sentence depending on the discourse context

RRL: A Rich Representation Language for the Description of Agent Behaviour in NECA

In this paper, we describe the Rich Representation Language (RRL) which is used in the NECA system. The NECA system generates interactions between two or more animated characters. The RRL is a formal framework for representing the information that is exchanged at the interfaces between the various NECA system modules

Structuring information through gesture and intonation

Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several “semiotic layers”, modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting

Generation of multi-modal dialogue for a net environment

In this paper an architecture and special purpose markup language for simulated affective face-to-face communication is presented. In systems based on this architecture, users will be able to watch embodied conversational agents interact with each other in virtual locations on the internet. The markup language, or Rich Representation Language (RRL), has been designed to provide an integrated representation of speech, gesture, posture and facial animation

Surface Structure, Intonation, and Meaning in Spoken Language

The paper briefly reviews a theory of intonational prosody and its relation syntax, and to certain oppositions of discourse meaning that have variously been called topic and comment , theme and rheme , given and new , or presupposition and focus . The theory, which is based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, is presented in full elsewhere. the present paper examines its consequences for the automatic synthesis and analysis of speech

Developing the modelling of Swedish prosody in spontaneous dialogue

The main goal of our current research is the development of the Swedish prosody model. In our analysis of discourse and dialogue intonation we are exploiting model-based resynthesis. By comparing synthesized default and fine-tuned pitch contours for dialogues under study we are able to isolate relevant intonation patterns. This analysis of intonation is related to an independent modelling of topic structure consisting of lexical-semantic analysis and text segmentation. Some results from our model-based acoustic analysis are presented, and the implementation in text-tospeech-synthesis is discussed. 1