System and method for synthesizing dialog-style speech using speech-act information

• US 20060129393A1
• Filed: 05/19/2005
• Published: 06/15/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 12/15/2004
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Original Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Inventors: Kim, Sanghun, Lee, Young Jik, Oh, Seung Shin, Kim, Jong Jin, Choi, Moonok
• Application Number:
  US11/132,310
• Publication Number:
  US 20060129393A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/234
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/04 Details of speech synthesis systems, e.g. synthesiser structure or memory management
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/08 Text analysis or generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text, e.g. grapheme to phoneme translation, prosody generation or stress or intonation determination

Abstract

A system and a method for synthesizing a dialog-style speech using speech-act information are provided. According to the system and the method, tagging for discriminating an intonation is performed for expressions whose intonations need to be differently realized depending on a dialog context in a dialog text using speech-act information extracted (from the) sentences uttered by two speakers having a dialog. When a speech is synthesized, a speech signal having an intonation appropriate for the tag is extracted from a speech DB and used, so that natural and various intonations appropriate for a dialog flow can be realized. Therefore, an aspect of an interaction in a dialog can be well expressed and thus improvement of naturalness in a dialog speech can be expected.

Claims

1. A system for synthesizing a dialog-style speech using speech-act information, comprising:

a preprocessing module for performing a normalization of an input sentence in order to preprocess the input sentence;

a linguistic module for performing a morphological tagging operation and a speech-act tagging operation for the preprocess-completed input sentence, discriminating whether a predetermined expression whose intonation should be selectively realized is included in the speech-act tagging-completed input sentence, and performing a tagging operation for the predetermined expression using an intonation tagging table where intonation tags are set so as to correspond to linguistic information extracted from a dialog context including a preceding sentence and a following sentence if the predetermined expression is included in the input sentence;

a prosodic module for giving an intonation;

a unit selector for extracting a marked relevant speech segment appropriate for an intonation tag of the expression in the input sentence; and

a speech generator for connecting a speech segment and another speech segment to generate and output a dialog-style synthesized speech.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising a synthesis unit database (DB) for providing the marked relevant speech segment appropriate for the tag to the unit selector.

3. A method for synthesizing a dialog-style speech using speech-act information, wherein an intonation tagging is performed by rules extracted in a statistical way using a context information consisting of speech-act information which is an analysis unit of a dialog represented in a preceding and a following utterances for predetermined words or sentences having the same form and whose intonations need to be realized differently depending on their meaning, and an intonation appropriate for a meaning and a dialog context is realized using a speech segment appropriate for a relevant tag when a speech is synthesized.

4. A method for synthesizing a dialog-style speech using speech-act information, comprising the steps of:

(a) performing a morphological tagging operation and a speech-act tagging operation for a preprocess-completed input sentence;

(b) discriminating whether a predetermined expression whose intonation should be selectively realized is included in the speech-act tagging-completed input sentence;

(c) if the predetermined expression is included in the input sentence, performing a tagging operation for the predetermined expression using an intonation tagging table where intonation tags are set so as to correspond to linguistic information extracted from a dialog context including a preceding sentence and a following sentence;

(d) extracting a relevant speech segment from a synthesis unit database (DB) where a speech segment appropriated for an intonation of the tagging-completed predetermined expression is marked; and

(e) connecting a speech segment and another speech segment to generate a dialog-style synthesized speech.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the step (c) comprises the steps of:

(c1) classifying intonation types of the predetermined expressions and the corresponding tags; and

(c2) performing an intonation tagging for the predetermined expression using rules or a table extracted on the basis of speech-act information obtained from a dialog context of a preceding and a following sentences of the predetermined expression or a range beyond those sentences in the input dialog text.

6. The method of claim 4, further comprising, before the step (a), the step of:

after a speech-act tagging is performed for a sentence of a dialog corpus on the basis of a speech-act tag set made for the relevant domain in advance, extracting information that becomes a clue determining each speech-act in a sentence to generate a speech-act tagging table.