An automatic prosody labeling system using ANN-based syntactic-prosodic model and GMM-based acoustic-prosodic model

Automatic prosody labeling is important for both speech synthesis and automatic speech understanding. Humans use both syntactic cues and acoustic cues to develop their prediction of prosody for a given utterance. This process can be effectively modeled by an ANN-based syntactic-prosodic model that predicts prosody from syntax and a GMM-based acoustic-prosodic model that predicts prosody from acoustic-prosodic observations. Our experiments on the Radio News Corpus show that ANN is effective in learning the stochastic mapping from the syntactic representation of word strings to prosody labels, with an accuracy of 82.7% for pitch accent labeling and 90.5% for intonational phrase boundary (IPB) labeling. When acoustic observations and reasonably accurate phoneme transcriptions are given, a GMM-based acoustic-prosodic model, coupled with the syntactical-prosodic model, can achieve 84% pitch accent recognition accuracy and 93% IPB recognition accuracy. These results are obtained using different speakers for training and testing and have considerably exceeded all previously reported results on the same corpus, especially for the task of IPB detection.