A unit selection approach to F0 modeling and its application to emphasis

The paper presents a new unit selection approach to F0 modeling for speech synthesis. We construct the F0 contour of an utterance by selecting portions of contours from a recorded speech database. In this approach, the elementary unit is the segment, which gives the system flexibility to combine segments from different phrases and model both macroprosody and microprosody. Using this method, we built a model of emphasis in English. Informal experimental results show that utterances whose prosody was generated with our method are generally preferred over utterances using Festival's handwritten rule-based F0 model.