Contrastive Accent in a Data-to-Speech System

Being able to predict the placement of contrastive accent is essential for the assignment of correct accentuation patterns in spoken language generation. I discuss two approaches to the generation of contrastive accent and propose an alternative method that is feasible and computationally attractive in data-to-speech systems. 1 Motivation The placement of pitch accent plays an important role in the interpretation of spoken messages. Utterances having the same surface structure but a di erent accentuation pattern may express very di erent meanings. A generation system for spoken language should therefore be able to produce appropriate accentuation patterns for its output messages. One of the factors determining accentuation is contrast. Its importance can be illustrated with an example from GoalGetter, a data-to-speech system which generates spoken soccer reports in Dutch (Klabbers et al., 1997). The input of the system is a typed data structure containing data on a soccer match. So-ca...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Mariët Theune
• Keywords: Accentuation Pattern, ACL 1997, ACL 2007, Contrastive Accent, Correct Accentuation Pattern