Soutenance de Master TIC de Mac Dang Khoa - Date : 7 septembre 2007, 17h30 - Lieu : Centre MICA

Interprète traducteur : le séminaire sera présenté en vietnamien

Abstract:
With tonal languages such as Vietnamese, the prosody of an utterance is the combination results of the two components: "micro-prosody", corresponding to the tone of individual syllable in a sentence and "macro-prosody", corresponding to the whole sentence.

The main goal of this thesis is to model the characteristics of Vietnamese prosody for speech synthesis. This work focuses on the influences of the macro-prosody on the micro-prosody, in three types of sentence: assertive, interrogative and imperative.

The first task is to set up a prosody corpus and extract all possible prosody parameters. Base on the extracted data, we defined seventy-two simple prosody patterns for Vietnamese syllables in these three types of sentence. After that, they were applied to synthesize some simple sentences. Finally, some perception experiments were taken to evaluate these synthesized sentences. The results shown that the proposed patterns can be applied successfully to generate the prosody of simple sentence.

This work is our preliminary work in Vietnamese prosody, just concerning the sentence types and the syllable positions in a sentence. In the future, we expect to continue this research with other factors of Vietnamese prosody, to improve our patterns and to apply them to our Vietnamese TTS system.