Abstract
The sentence intonation is very important for differentiation of sentence types (declarative sentences, questions, etc.), especially in languages without fixed word order. Thus, it is very important to deal with that also in text-to-speech systems. This paper concerns the problem of wh-question, where its intonation differs from the intonation of another basic question type – yes/no question. We discuss the possibility to use wh-questions (recorded during the speech corpus preparation) in speech synthesis. The inclusion and appropriate usage of these recordings is tested in a real text-to-speech system and evaluated by listening tests. Furthermore, we focus on the problem of the perception of wh-question by listeners, with the aim to reveal whether listeners really prefer phonologically correct (falling) intonation in this type of questions.
M. Jůzová—This research was supported by Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, project No. LO1506, and by the grant of the University of West Bohemia, project No. SGS-2016-039.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that only neutral speech is taken into account in this paper since our TTS system does not currently involve emotions.
- 2.
The important communication function in (complex/compound) declarative sentences is manifested with falling intonation only in the last phrase. Therefore, we sometimes substitute a term declarative sentence with a term declarative phrase.
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Jůzová, M., Tihelka, D. (2016). Difficulties with Wh-Questions in Czech TTS System. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_41
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