Abstract
A pre-processing system for assigning prosodic characteristics of speech was created in order to investigate how synthesized speech can capture the global characteristics of discourse structure. The system allows manipulation of a variety of prosodic characteristics that have been tied to the structure of discourse above the level of the sentence, in particular: pitch fluctuation, pitch range, speaking rate, and pauses. These characteristics can be used to highlight the onset of a discourse segment, defined as a group of utterances that contribute to a single discourse purpose. After highlighting the onset of the discourse segments, these speech characteristics are progressively modified to indicate the continuity of the discourse segment. The system was evaluated by comparing it to a corpus of natural speech, the Boston Directions Corpus. That corpus has been analyzed both in terms of the informational content of the discourse and the acoustic manifestations that appear in natural speech for conveying that content. Ways in which those acoustic manifestations can be realized in natural speech are discussed.
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