The Information Structure–prosody interface in text-to-speech technologies. An empirical perspective

Abstract

The correspondence between the communicative intention of a speaker in terms of Information Structure and the way this speaker reflects communicative aspects by means of prosody have been a fruitful field of study in Linguistics. However, text-to-speech applications still lack the variability and richness found in human speech in terms of how humans display their communication skills. Some attempts were made in the past to model one aspect of Information Structure, namely thematicity for its application to intonation generation in text-to-speech technologies. Yet, these applications suffer from two limitations: (i) they draw upon a small number of made-up simple question-answer pairs rather than on real (spoken or written) corpus material; and (ii) they do not explore whether any other interpretation would better suit a wider range of textual genres beyond dialogs. In this paper, two different interpretations of thematicity in the field of speech technologies are examined: the state-of-art binary (and flat) theme-rheme, and the hierarchical thematicity defined by Igor Mel’čuk within the Meaning-Text Theory. The outcome of the experiments on a corpus of native speakers of US English suggests that the latter interpretation of thematicity has a versatile implementation potential for text-to-speech applications of the Information Structure–prosody interface.

Topical Theme Depicted in the Speech of Indonesian Minister of the State Secretariat

“…This indicates that the function is dependent on the complete content of the material. There is no free combination that a topical theme can use to freely choose as its function because there are no free pairs of combinations (Calhoun, 2010;Domínguez et al, 2022). The theme-rheme configuration has allowed for the linearization of the process of function determination.…”

The Topical Theme Depicted in the Talks of Education in Indonesian’s TEDx

“…Beside, there is an another kind of phrasal construction, which is known as the adjective phrase (AP). The noun phrase has been interpreted as a constituent of the utterance with the adjective-headed location where a topical theme might occur (Doḿinguez et al, 2017;Domínguez et al, 2022). The AP "the most important" (also written as TT-03) has been 25…”