Analysis and modeling of “focus” in context
Dirk Hovy, Gopala K. Anumanchipalli, Alok Parlikar, Caroline Vaughn, Adam C. Lammert, Eduard H. Hovy, Alan W. Black · 2013
This paper uses a crowd-sourced definition of a speech phe-nomenon we have called “focus”. Given sentences, text and speech, in isolation and in context, we asked annotators to iden-tify what we term the “focus ” word. We present their consis-tency in identifying the focused word, when presented with text or speech stimuli. We then build models to show how well we predict that focus word from lexical (and higher) level features. Also, using spectral and prosodic information, we show the dif-ferences in these focus words when spoken with and without context. Finally, we show how we can improve speech synthe-sis of these utterances given focus information.