Patent ID: 8126717

Claim:
A computing that predicts prosodic parameters from annotated speech files having annotations, the computing device comprising: a processor; a first module that, via the processor, generates initial accent and boundary labels from annotated speech files based on binary decisions; and a second module that uses the generated initial accent and boundary labels to iteratively grow a classification and regression tree to generate improved classification and regression trees for predicting prosody parameters from text by: (1) adding predicted linguistic features to text-derived annotations in the speech files; (2) adding normalized syllable durations to the annotations; (3) adding a plurality of extracted acoustic features to the annotations; (4) generating initial accent and boundary labels by considering pauses and relative syllable durations; (5) training classification and regression trees to predict durations and F0s from the predicted linguistic features and the internal accent and boundary labels; (6) training refined classification and regression trees to predict normalized durations; (7) training a first classifier to label accents and boundaries by: (a) training an n-next-neighborhood classifier to recognize predicted accent and predicted boundary labels; (b) training the refined classification and regression trees to output accent and boundary probabilities from linguistic features and relative syllable durations; (c) relabeling the annotations; (8) training the refined classification and regression trees to predict accents and boundaries from linguistic features only; (9) relabeling the annotations; and (10) returning to step (5) until prosodic labels stabilize.