SPEECH SYNTHESIS WITH PROSODIC PHRASE BOUNDARY INFORMATION

Text-to-speech conversion uses pattern-matching to predict the position of phrase boundaries in spoken output. Text input to the is analyzed to identify groups of words (known as “chunks”) which are unlikely to contain internal phrase boundaries. Both the chunks and individual words are labeled with their syntactic characteristics. Access is made to a database of sentences which also contains such syntactic labels, together with indications of where a human reader would insert minor and major phrase boundaries. The parts of the database which have the most similar syntactic characteristics are found and phrase boundaries are predicted based on the phrase boundaries found in those parts. Other characteristics may also be used in the pattern-matching process.