Browsing by Author "Girmay, Gebremichael"

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    Prosodic Modeling for Amharic
    (Addis Ababa University, 2008-04) Girmay, Gebremichael; Girmaw, Molalgne (PhD)
    During daily speech communications, we systematically employ variations in pitch, loudness, phrasing and duration of spoken segments to express our intentions, attitudes and assumptions. These cues are continuously picked by our listeners and our intentions are communicated. This phenomenon is what is termed as prosody. Various languages have been modeled using a prosodic modeling framework and have been used to varying degrees of success in applications like speech synthesis systems. The prosodic features of speech are largely dependent on the language, thus it is imperative that prosodic models be developed and tested for each language to apply them in (language specific) speech synthesis applications. In this study the prosodic nature of Amharic is investigated, and based on the investigation the prosodic cues of Amharic are identified and an Amharic prosodic model based on the ToBI framework is developed. This hypothesized model is then be subjected to a rigorous test to determine whether it results in improvement of Amharic synthetic speech in terms of naturalness and intelligibility.