Focus to emphasize tone analysis for prosodic generation
Emphasizing prosody of a sentence at its focus part when producing a speakers utterance can improve the recognition rate to hearers and reduce its ambiguity. Our objective is to address this challenge by analysing the concept of foci in speech utterances and the relationship of focus, speakers intention and prosody. Our investigation is aimed at understanding and modelling how a speakers utterances are influenced by the speakers intentions. The relationship between speakers intentions and focus information is used to consider which parts of the sentence serve as the focus parts. We propose using the Focus to Emphasize Tone (FET) analysis, which includes: (i) generating the constraints for foci, speakers intention and prosodic features, (ii) defining the intonation patterns, (iii) labelling a set of prosodic marks for a sentence. We also design the FET structure to support our analysis and to contain focus, speakers intention and prosodic components. An implementation of the system is described and the evaluation results on the CMU Communicator (CMUCOM) dataset are presented.
speakers intention prosodic annotation focus analysis unification-base grammar hpsg