Multiparametric generation of French prosody from unrestricted text

Automatic assignment of prosodic parameters for a text-to-speech synthesis system for French is presented. A structural linguistic preprocessing using a lexical processor and a pre-syntactic analyser parses the text into sense groups which are assigned prosodic markers. A multiparametric qualitative model of French prosody generates the temporal. pausal, intonative and intensity structure of each utterance, using Fujisaki's source command model. Tested with the INRS text-to-speech system, this prosodic generator increases naturalness for naive listeners.