Modeling segmental duration in German text-to-speech synthesis

The paper reports on the construction of a model for segmental duration in German. The model predicts the durations of speech sounds in various textual, prosodic, and segmental contexts. It has been implemented in the German version of the Bell Labs text to speech system (R. Sproat and J. Olive, 1995; B. Mobius et al., 1996). The construction of the duration system was made efficient by the use of an interactive statistical analysis package that incorporates the approach outlined by J.P.H. van Santen (1994). The results an stored in tables in a format that can be directly interpreted by the TTS duration module. Tables are constructed in two phases: inferential statistical analysis of the speech corpus, and parameter estimation. The overall correlation between observed and predicted segmental durations is .896.