Sentences sentence-final prosody

While sentence splitting is not the most complex of tasks in TTS, it is important to get right and this is mainly due to the fact that sentence-final prosody is one of the phenomena that listeners are most sensitive to. Generating the high quality sentence-final prosody is hard enough in its own right, but if the sentence boundary is in the wrong place, then the system has no chance. 

Informally we can describe prosody as the part of human communication which expresses emotion, emphasises words, shows speaker attitude, breaks a sentence into phrases, governs sentence rhythm and controls the intonation, pitch or tune of the utterance. This chapter describes how to predict prosodic form from the text while Chapter 9 goes on to describe how to synthesize the acoustics of prosodic from these form representations. In this chapter we first we introduce the various manifestations of prosody in terms of phrasing, prominence and intonation. Next we go on to describe how prosody is used in communication, and in particular explain why this has a much more direct affect on the final speech patterns than with verbal communication. Finally we describe techniques for predicting what prosody should be generated from a text input. 

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