The Prosodizer - Automatic Prosodic Annotations of Speech Synthesis Databases

Prosodic annotations are used for locating and characterizing prominent parts in utterances as well as identifying and de-scribing boundaries of coherent stretches of speech. In speech synthesis prosodic annotations can be used to improve the unit selection process and subsequently yield more natural sound-ing synthesis. A method for automatic prosodic annotations of speech is described in this paper. This method is implemented in a computer program called Prosodizer that integrates acous-tic features of F0 and RMS as well as syntactic and segmental information like POS tags and syllable boundaries. Design and preliminary performance results are described. 1