Speaking Style Modeling of Various Discourse Genres in HMM-Based Speech Synthesis (with N. Obin)

• This work presents an approach for modeling speaking style of various discourse genres in speech synthesis.
• The proposed approach is based on phonological and acoustic average discourse genre - dependent speaking style parametric models.
• The phonological module models the average abstract prosodic structure of a specific discourse genre.
• The acoustic module jointly models average speaking style voice and prosodic cues of a given discourse genre.
• Discourse genre - dependent speaking style models have been estimated for 4 discourses genres and evaluated on a speaking style prosodic identification perceptual experiment.
• A comparison with speaking style identification on real speech is discussed and reveals consistent performance of the proposed approach.

1. Speaking Style Modeling of Various Discourse Genres in HMM-Based Speech Synthesis,
   N. Obin, P. Lanchantin, A. Lacheret-Dujour and X. Rodet,
   ICASSP 2011, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011, Submitted