Estimating Sentence Final Tone Labels using Dialogue-Act Information for Text-to-Speech Synthesis within a Spoken Dialogue System

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel sentence final tone labels estimation method using dialogue-act (DA) informationfor text-to-speech synthesis within a spoken dialogue system. Estimating appropriate sentence final tone labels isconsidered essential for communicating the exact system’s intentions to users by an utterance. In this paper, wepropose to utilize DA features as well as the conventional features, morphological information of the utterance text, toestimate the sentence final tone labels. For this study, we use the speech database with DA tags which we constructedin our previous study. We added sentence final tone labels to this database so that each utterance has all informationof utterance text, DA and sentence final tone label. Based on this database, we build the proposed sentence final toneestimation model. We evaluated the proposed method by comparing its performance with the conventional method.The evaluation results show that the proposed method overwhelms the conventional method in accuracy. We alsoanalyze the estimation results to investigate the efficacy and difficulty by the proposed method.