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Informationen zum Autor E. Keller is the editor of Improvements in Speech Synthesis: Cost 258: The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech, published by Wiley. G. Bailly is the editor of Improvements in Speech Synthesis: Cost 258: The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech, published by Wiley. Klappentext Naturalness in synthetic speech is one of the most intractable problems in information technology today. Although speech synthesis systems have improved considerably over the last 20 years, they rarely sound entirely like human speakers. Why is this so, and what can be done about it? Prosodic processing must be rendered more varied and more appropriate to the speech situation Timing, melodic control and the relationships between the various prosodic parameters need increased attention Signal processing systems must be developed and perfected that are capable of generating more than just one voice from a database A better understanding must be achieved of what distinguishes one voice from another, and of how speech styles differ between simply reading aloud numbers and sentences and their use in interactive speech New evaluation methodologies should be developed to provide objective and subjective measurements of the intelligibility of the synthetic speech and the cognitive load imposed upon the listener by impoverished stimuli Adequate text markup systems must be proposed and tested with multiple languages in real-world situations Further research is required to integrate speech synthesis systems into larger natural-language processing systems Improvements in Speech Synthesis presents the latest research in the above areas. Contributors include speech synthesis specialists from 16 countries, with experience in the development of systems for 12 European languages. This volume emerges from a four-year European COST project focussed on "The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech", and will be a valuable text for everyone involved in speech synthesis. Zusammenfassung This is an accumulation of studies emanating from COST 258! a European action concerned with issues in the improvement of speech synthesis. It addresses improving the output quality when producing speech synthesis for world languages and presents the research results of COST 258. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of Contributors. Preface. PART I: ISSUES IN SIGNAL GENERATION. Towards Greater Naturalness: Future Directions of Research in Speech Synthesis (Keller, E.). Towards More Versatile Signal Generation Systems (Bailly, G). A Parametric Harmonic + Noise Model (Bailly, G.). The COST 258 Signal Generation Test Array (Bailly, G.). Concatenative Text-to-Speech Synthesis Based on Sinusoidal Modelling (Banga, E.R. et al). Shape Invariant Pitch and Time-Scale Modification of Speech Based on a Harmonic Model (O'Brien, D. & Monaghan, A.). Concatenative Speech Synthesis Using SRELP (Rank, E.). PART II: ISSUES IN PROSODY. Prosody in Synthetic Speech: Problems, Solutions and Challenges (Monaghan, A.). State-of-the-Art Summary of European Synthetic Prosody R&D (Monaghan,A.). Modelling F0 Contour in Various Romance Languages: Implementation in Some TTS Systems (Martin, P.). Acoustic Characterisation of the Tonic Syllable in Portuguese (Teixeira, J.P. and Freitas, D.). Prosodic Parameter of Synthetic Czech: Developing Rules for Duration and Intensity (Dohalska, M. et al). MFGI, a Linguistically Motivated Quantitative Model of German Prosody (Mixdorff, H.). Improvements in Modelling the FO Contour for Different Types of Intonation Units in Slovene (Dobnikar, A.). Representing Speech Rhythm (Keller, B.Z. and Keller, E.). Phonetic and Timing Considerations in a Swiss High German TTS System (Siebenhaar, B. et al). Corpus-based Devel...
