Reading-and-Prosodic Information Generation Using Morphological Analysis based on Multi-level Analysis Method and its Word Dictionary Components

Abstract

In order for Japanese text-to-speech synthesis to provide highly natural synthesized speech, it is necessary to correctly generate reading-and-prosodic information, that is, information about readings, accents, pauses, and so on. This paper describes a method of generating reading-and-prosodic information that uses morphological analysis based on the multi-level analysis method, which deeply analyses compound words and heteronyms; also described is the word dictionary information used in the method. The main characteristics of this generation method are: (1) long unit word recognition in the morphological analysis to cope with generating reading-andprosodic information, (2) accentual phrase assignment using semantic dependent relationships in compound words, (3) pause insertion based on multi-level assignment using local structures in compound words and connected power of accentual phrases instead of dependent relationships of syntactic phrases. In an evaluation for news-texts, this method generated reading-and-prosodic information with 95% accuracy for closed data and 91% accuracy for open data. These results show the effectiveness of this method.