METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PAUSE DURATION PROCESSING IN CHINESE VOICE SYNTHESIS

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To synthesize a voice of Chinese having a natural pause by reproducing a pause for breathing in a human speech. SOLUTION: A word inspection part 12 and a part-of-speech/extension syntax inspection part 13 inspect semantic units in an object sentence of voice synthesis by referring to a dictionary memory 11 stored with information for extending words into a phrase. The positions before and after a semantic unit are provided as pause position candidates. A pause position calculation part 18 calculates weighted values of pauses as respective pause position candidates through a sequence based upon respective semantic units in the sentence and their positions. When a pause position candidate has a weighted value of a pause larger than a predetermined value, it is determined as a pause position and pause duration is specified. Through this calculation of the weighted value of the pause, the pause position in the sentence and its pause duration can accurately be determined.