The objectives of this project are (1) to develop a computational model of prosody for speech synthesis and analysis, and (2) evaluate this model in speech synthesis and as a potential knowledge source for speech recognition and understanding. The approach is multidisciplinary, combining linguistic theory, speech knowledge and statistical modeling technique. The initial model is based on FM radio newscasting speech. The research effort includes: design and collection of an appropiate database, hand labeling of prosodic units and measurement of their acoustic correlates in part of the database, development of techniques to automatically segement and label prosodic units, implementation and evaluation of the model for analysis and synthesis.
