Acoustic analysis and decision tree-based shifting hierarchical approach for prediction of Uyghur prosodic boundary

Abstract

Correct prosodic boundary prediction is crucial for the quality of synthesized speech in text-to-speech system. This article mainly presents the prosodic hierarchy of Uyghur language, which belongs to Turkish language family of Altaic language system and further verifies the reliability of proposed Uyghur prosodic boundary annotation rules by acoustic analysis. In the prediction part, a two-layer shifting hierarchical approach based on decision tree is used for predicting prosodic word and prosodic phrase boundary, and the influence of different feature sets on the Uyghur prosodic boundary prediction is also investigated. Experimental results clearly show the acoustical changes and automatic prediction performance of different prosodic boundaries of Uyghur language, thus laying a good foundation for further research.