Mandarin Prosodic Phrase Prediction based on Syntactic Trees

Zhengchen Zhang, Fuxiang Wu, Chenyu Yang, Minghui Dong, Fugen Zhou

Prosodic phrases (PPs) are important for Mandarin Text-To-Speech systems. Most of the existing PP detection methods need large manually annotated corpora to learn the models. In this paper, we propose a rule based method to predict the PP boundaries employing the syntactic information of a sentence. The method is based on the observation that a prosodic phrase is a meaningful segment of a sentence with length restrictions. A syntactic structure allows to segment a sentence according to grammars. We add some length restrictions to the segmentations to predict the PP boundaries. An F-Score of 0.693 was obtained in the experiments, which is about 0.02 higher than the one got by a Conditional Random Field based method.

doi: 10.21437/SSW.2016-26

Cite as: Zhang, Z., Wu, F., Yang, C., Dong, M., Zhou, F. (2016) Mandarin Prosodic Phrase Prediction based on Syntactic Trees. Proc. 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW 9), 160-165, doi: 10.21437/SSW.2016-26

@inproceedings{zhang16_ssw,
  author={Zhengchen Zhang and Fuxiang Wu and Chenyu Yang and Minghui Dong and Fugen Zhou},
  title={{Mandarin Prosodic Phrase Prediction based on Syntactic Trees}},
  year=2016,
  booktitle={Proc. 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW 9)},
  pages={160--165},
  doi={10.21437/SSW.2016-26}
}