Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Theune, Mariët; Meijs, K.; Heylen, Dirk; Ordelman, Roeland

doi:10.1109/tasl.2006.876129

Cited by 92 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The term "variety of styles" has been introduced as a domain-dependent point of study. For example, ESS can convey messages such as "good-bad news", "yes-no questions" [51], "storytelling" [52], and "military" [53].…”

Section: Expressive Speech Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic mapping of text font based on the dimensional theory of emotions: a case study on style and size

Tsonos

2016

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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Current text-to-speech systems do not support the effective provision of the semantics and the cognitive aspects of the documents' typographic cues (e.g., font type, style, and size). A novel approach is introduced for the acoustic rendition of text font based on the emotional analogy between the visual (text font cues) and the acoustic (speech prosody) modalities. The methodology is based on: a) modeling reader's emotional state response ("Pleasure", "Arousal" and "Dominance") induced by the document's font cues and b) the acoustic mapping of the emotional state using expressive speech synthesis. A case study was conducted for the proposed methodology by calculating the prosodic values on specific font cues (several font styles and font sizes) and by examining listeners' preferences on the acoustic rendition of bold, italics, bold-italics, and various font sizes. The experimental results after the user evaluation indicate that the acoustic rendition of font size variations as well as bold and italics is recognized successfully, but bold-italics are confused with bold, due to the similarities of their prosodic variations.

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Section: Expressive Speech Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic mapping of text font based on the dimensional theory of emotions: a case study on style and size

Tsonos

2016

J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC.

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“…The factors are calculated by dividing the average desired (i.e. storytelling) prosodic values with the average neutral prosodic values [13]. For example, global rule modification factor of accented syllables for pitch in female storyteller is calculated as follows:…”

Section: Prosodic Parameter Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach was undertaken by many expressive TTS in Dutch [6], English [7], Catalan [8], Spanish [9], Indian [10], German [11] and Korean [12] languages. In [13], global rules are used to modify prosodic parameters of pitch, intensity, overall speech tempo and pause duration to convert neutral speech into storytelling. In a more recent work, local rules are employed at phrase-level instead of sentence-level to synthesize storytelling speaking style in Bengali, Hindi, and Telugu.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rule-Based Storytelling Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis

et al. 2016

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Abstract. In recent years, various real life applications such as talking books, gadgets and humanoid robots have drawn the attention to pursue research in the area of expressive speech synthesis. Speech synthesis is widely used in various applications. However, there is a growing need for an expressive speech synthesis especially for communication and robotic. In this paper, global and local rule are developed to convert neutral to storytelling style speech for the Malay language. In order to generate rules, modification of prosodic parameters such as pitch, intensity, duration, tempo and pauses are considered. Modification of prosodic parameters is examined by performing prosodic analysis on a story collected from an experienced female and male storyteller. The global and local rule is applied in sentence level and synthesized using HNM. Subjective tests are conducted to evaluate the synthesized storytelling speech quality of both rules based on naturalness, intelligibility, and similarity to the original storytelling speech. The results showed that global rule give a better result than local rule

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“…Shared story reading with parents or teachers helps children to learn about vocabulary, syntax and phonology, and to develop narrative comprehension and awareness of the concepts of print, all of which are linked to developing reading and writing skills (National Early Literacy Panel 2008). While acknowledging that the parental role in storytelling is irreplaceable, we consider text-to-speech (TTS) enabled storytelling systems (Rusko et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2003;Theune et al, 2006) to be aligned with the class of childoriented applications that aim to aid learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For a TTS-based digital storytelling system to successfully create an experience as engaging as human storytelling, the underlying speech synthesis system has to narrate the story in a "storytelling speech style" (Theune et al, 2006), generate dialogs uttered by different characters using synthetic voices appropriate for each character's gender, age and personality (Greene et al, 2012), and express quotes demonstrating emotions such as sadness, fear, happiness, anger and surprise (Alm, 2008) with realistic expression (Murray and Arnott, 2008). However, before any of the aforementioned requirements -all related to speech generation -can be met, the text of the story has to be analyzed to identify which portions of the text should be rendered by the narrator and which by each of the characters in the story, who are the different characters in the story, what is each character's gender, age, or other salient personality attributes that may influence the voice assigned to that character, and what is the expressed affect in each of the character quotes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL)

Feldman¹,

Kazantseva²,

Śzpakowicz³

2014

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ii Preface Welcome to the third edition of the workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature. What started out two years ago as a small affair with an unorthodox title seems to be shaping into a modestly sized but vibrant research community.Thanks to the effort of the authors and the program committee, April 27, 2014 promises to be an interesting day. This year's workshop boasts the rich pickings of papers focussed on creating character representations from text and on applications of such representations. Agarwal et al. present a system for extracting social networks from movie scripts. Coll Ardanuy and Sporleder propose a method of finding similar novels using social networks as the underlying representation. Bullard and Alm work on identifying social information about characters from dialogues in a corpus of plays. Taking this a step further, Iosif and Mishra describe an integrated system for identifying and classifying characters in children's stories based on direct and indirect speech.Taking a complementary point of view, the position paper by Levison and Lessard builds upon their previous work and proposes a graph-based representation for the temporal structure of narratives. The paper by Zemánek and Milička describes a diachronic study of Arabic literature, tracing the influence of certain treatises across centuries.In the categories all of their own are two more papers. Davis and Mohammad break new ground with a paper on generating music from literature; you can listen to a one-minute musical summary of a novel. Mike Kestemont presents a position paper on authorship attribution, a topic which was quite popular in the 2012 and 2013 editions of the workshop.Last but by no means least, we are delighted to have two invited speakers this year. An artist and researcher María Mencía from Kingston University in London will talk about electronic poetry. Jan Christoph Meister from University of Hamburg will tell us about the connections between narratology and computation.We look forward to seeing you in Göteborg. Language-Art Digital Poetics: An exploration of digital textualities in the production of artistic research María Mencía Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Kingston University AbstractAs an academic and an artist my practice-based research is at the intersection of language, art and digital technology. It explores the area of the in-between, the visual, the aural and the semantic. I am always interested in experimenting with the digital medium with the aim of engaging the reader/viewer/user in an experience of shifting 'in' and 'out' of language. This involves looking 'at' and looking 'through' transparent and abstract textualities and linguistic soundscapes. It draws from avant-garde poetics remediating concepts of reading and writing, exploring digital media grammars (voice activation, use of webcam, use of mouse, acts of revealing, triggering, cut and paste, dragging) for interactivity, aesthetics, engagement and meaning production. It is trans-disciplinary, bringing together different cultu...

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Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Cited by 92 publications

References 18 publications

Prosodic mapping of text font based on the dimensional theory of emotions: a case study on style and size

Prosodic mapping of text font based on the dimensional theory of emotions: a case study on style and size

Rule-Based Storytelling Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL)

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