Dialogue act based expressive speech synthesis in limited domain for the Czech language
This paper deals with expressive speech synthesis in a dialogue. Dialogue acts - discrete expressive categories - are used for expressivity description. The aim of the work is to create a procedure for development of expressive speech synthesis for a dialogue system in a limited domain. The domain i...
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Published in | Informatica (Ljubljana) Vol. 44; no. 2; pp. 147 - 165 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Ljubljana
Slovenian Society Informatika / Slovensko drustvo Informatika
01.06.2020
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
ISSN | 0350-5596 1854-3871 1854-3871 |
DOI | 10.31449/inf.v44i2.2559 |
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Summary: | This paper deals with expressive speech synthesis in a dialogue. Dialogue acts - discrete expressive categories - are used for expressivity description. The aim of the work is to create a procedure for development of expressive speech synthesis for a dialogue system in a limited domain. The domain is here limited to dialogues between a human and a computer on a given topic of reminiscing about personal photographs. To incorporate expressivity into synthetic speech, modihcations of current algorithms used for neutral speech synthesis are made. An expressive speech corpus is recorded, annotated using a predehned set of dialogue acts, and its acoustic analysis is performed. Unit selection and HMM-based methods are used to synthesize expressive speech, and an evaluation using listening tests is presented. The listeners asses two basic aspects of synthetic expressive speech for isolated utterances: speech quality and expressivity perception. The evaluation is also performed for utterances in a dialogue to asses appropriateness of synthetic expressive speech. It can be concluded that synthetic expressive speech is rated positively even though it is of worse quality when comparing with the neutral speech synthesis. However, synthetic expressive speech is able to transmit expressivity to listeners and to improve the naturalness of the synthetic speech. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 |
ISSN: | 0350-5596 1854-3871 1854-3871 |
DOI: | 10.31449/inf.v44i2.2559 |