PROSODY TEMPLATE MATCHING FOR TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYSTEMS

A prosody matching template in the form of a tree structure stores indices which point to lookup table and template information prescribing pitch and duration values that are used to add inflection to the output of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The lookup module employs a search algorithm that explores each branch of the tree, assigning penalty scores based on whether the syllable represented by a node of the tree does or does not match the corresponding syllable of the target word. The path with the lowest penalty score is selected as the index into the prosody template table. The system will add nodes by cloning existing nodes in cases where it is not possible to find a one-to-one match between the number of syllables in the target word and the number of nodes in the tree.