Patent ID: 7200558
Filing Date: 2007-04-03
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
1. A prosody generation apparatus that receives phonological information and linguistic information so as to generate prosody, the prosody generation apparatus referring to (a) a variation estimation rule storage unit that stores a variation estimation rule of prosody at prosody changing points, the variation estimation rule being predetermined beforehand according to attributes concerning phonology or attributes concerning linguistic information of the prosody changing points of speech data; and (b) an absolute value estimation rule storage unit that stores an absolute value estimation rule of the prosody at the prosody changing points, the absolute value estimation rule being predetermined beforehand according to attributes concerning the phonology or the linguistic information of the prosody changing points of the speech data; comprising: a prosody changing point setting unit that sets a prosody changing point according to at least any one of the received phonological information and the linguistic information; a variation estimation unit that estimates a variation of prosody at the prosody changing point according to the estimation rule stored in the variation estimation rule storage unit, based on the received phonological information and the linguistic information; an absolute value estimation unit that estimates an absolute value of the prosody at the prosody changing point according to the absolute value estimation rule stored in the absolute value estimation rule storage unit, based on the received phonological information and the linguistic information; and a prosody generation unit that generates prosody for a prosody changing point by shifting the variation estimated by the variation estimation unit so as to correspond to the absolute value obtained by the absolute value estimation unit and generates prosody for a portion other than prosody changing points by carrying out interpolation between the thus generated prosody for prosody changing points.