Prosody modeling with soft templates

This paper describes a novel prosody generation model. We intend it to broadly support many linguistic theories and multiple languages, for the model imposes no restriction on accent categories and shapes. This capability is crucial to the next generation of text-to-speech systems that will need to synthesize intonation variations for different speech acts, emotions, and styles of speech. The system supports mark-up tags that are mathematically defined and generate f(0) deterministically. Underlying the tags is an articulatory model of accent interaction which balances physiological and communication constraints. We specify the model by way of an algorithm for calculating the pitch, and by way of examples. The model allows localized, linguistically reasonable tags, and is suitable for a data-driven fitting process. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.