TR-IT-0202 :1997.01

Tony Hebert and Nick Campbell

Prosody within CHATR

Abstract:Prosody makes a synthesized utterance sound more human, more intelligible. My work has consisted in improving the prosody processing within CHATR. This task has involved debugging and tracing the existing speech synthesis code, in order to determine which points had to be improved. This analysis enabled me to realize a detailed CHATR map, a document which shows step by step the whole prosody processing within CHATR. This is given in the chapter 1. Chapter 2 explains which parts of CHATR code I have modified and why. I also describe code I have written which might be integrated in future into CHATR. The third chapter of this report discusses the possible use of a parser from Dept3. This module is likely to improve the pause prediction. I also describe an algorithm to use this new module, the first results and how the new module should be integrated into CHATR.