Pitch pattern generation apparatus

• US 5,475,796 A
• Filed: 12/21/1992
• Issued: 12/12/1995
• Est. Priority Date: 12/20/1991
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: NEC Corporation
• Original Assignee: NEC Corporation
• Inventors: Iwata, Kazuhiko
• Primary Examiner(s): Knepper, David D.
• Assistant Examiner(s): Dorvil, Richemond
• Application Number:
  US07/993,858
• Time in Patent Office: 1,086 Days
• Field of Search: 395/2.69, 395/2.16, 395/2, 395/2.77, 381/52
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/10 Prosody rules derived from text; Stress or intonation

Abstract

A pitch pattern defining intonation for a text-to-speech system is generated in accordance with a part of speech (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.) of each word which can be determined more accurately than the syntactic structure of a sentence. The pitch pattern is generated in response to the combinations of parts of speech of adjacent words in a sentence based on the fact that any combination in parts of speech of two words at both sides of each word boundary reflects the strength of connection in meaning of the adjacent words.

Claims

1. A pitch pattern generation apparatus for generating a pitch pattern to define information for a speech synthesizer apparatus to convert an input sentence into synthetic speech comprising:

a stress level ratio memory section to store stress level ratios for combinations of adjacent parts of speech;

a morpheme analysis section to separate the input sentence into discrete words and to determine the part of speech of each word;

an accent component generation section to read out the stress strength as accent components from said stress level ratio memory section in response to parts of speech combinations of adjacent words in said input sentence; and

a pitch pattern generation section to generate the pitch pattern based on the read out accent components.

2. A pitch pattern generation apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said pitch pattern generation section generates the pitch pattern by superimposing the accent components read out of said accent component generation section and a phrase component of the sentence.

3. A pitch pattern generation apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said pitch pattern generation section gives a pitch frequency for at least one point per word to determine a shape of each word, thereby generating the pitch pattern for the entire sentence.

4. The pitch pattern generation apparatus of claim 1 wherein said accent component generation section reads out the stress strength from said stress level ratio memory section in response to said parts of speech combinations at both sides of said discrete words of said input sentence.