The SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody

This is an overview of a Joint Research Project within the Scientific co-operation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland (SCOPES) Program of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Within the SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody, in the course of the following two years, the four partners aim to collaborate on the subject of speech prosody and advance the extraction, processing, modeling and transfer of prosody for a large portfolio of European languages: French, German, Italian, English, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. Through the intertwined four research plans, synergies are foreseen to emerge that will build a foundation for submitting strong joint proposals for EU funding

Design of a Speech Corpus for Research on Cross-Lingual Prosody Transfer

Since the prosody of a spoken utterance carries information about its discourse function, salience, and speaker attitude, prosody mod- els and prosody generation modules have played a crucial part in text-to- speech (TTS) synthesis systems from the beginning, especially those set not only on sounding natural, but also on showing emotion or particular speaker intention. Prosody transfer within speech-to-speech translation is a recent research area with increasing importance, with one of its most important research topics being the detection and treatment of salient events, i.e. instances of prominence or focus which do not result from syn- tactic constraints, but are rather products of semantic or pragmatic level eects. This paper presents the design and the guidelines for the creation of a multilingual speech corpus containing prosodically rich sentences, ultimately aimed at training statistical prosody models for multilingual prosody transfer in the context of expressive speech synthesis