The prosodic marking of the contrast between restrictive and appositive clause in Dutch Vincent J....
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The prosodic marking of the contrast between
restrictive and appositive clause in Dutch
Vincent J. van Heuven
With the help of:Crit Cremers, Hanna Gauvin, Constantijn Kaland, Eddin Najetovic,
Marjoleine Sloos, Hanna de Vries
Linguistics Program, Universiteit Leiden
Towards the phonetics of the relative clause in
Dutch
Vincent J. van Heuven
With the help of:Crit Cremers, Hanna Gauvin, Constantijn Kaland, Eddin Najetovic,
Marjoleine Sloos, Hanna de Vries
Linguistics Program, Universiteit Leiden
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 3
Introduction
Framework: improving prosody of text-to-speech (TTS) systems
Our parser/generator Delilah computes rich syntactic and semantic structures
Can be interfaced to standard TTS systems for Dutch
Opportunities for phonetic optimalisation of output
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 4
Introduction
Grammatical distinction in relative clause (1) Restrictive clause
Within scope of antecedentRel. pronoun is not subject of relative clauseNot preceded by comma in textSuggests relatively shallow prosodic boundary
E.g. No journalist [who signed the petition], was arrested.
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 5
Introduction
Grammatical distinction in relative clause (2) Appositive clause
Not within scope of antecedentRel. pronoun is subject of relative clausePreceded by comma in text inputSuggests relatively deep prosodic boundary,
E.g.Michael, [who beat up his girl friend], was arrested.
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 6
Introduction
Questions How is the contrast between restrictive and
appositive clause coded in the prosody? Does the listener associate a specific
prosodic structure with each type of clause?
Does correct prosodic marking yield better evaluation scores of text-to-speech system?
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 7
Prosodic boundaries
The deeper a prosodic boundary, ... ... the longer the physical silence
(pause) immediately before the boundary
... the stronger the domain-final lengthening
... the more disruptive the intonation pattern
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 8
Approach (1)
Perceptual evaluation of prosodic marking of Synthetised speech with restrictive vs.
appositive clauses With / without pause With / without domain-final
lengthening Four different melodies
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 9
Approach (2)
Four melodies at utterance-internal boundary
Cohesion marker H*L
No/neutral marker H*+L
Moderate break H* %L
Strong break H*L H% %L
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 10
Approach (3)
Two sentence structures that force just one interpretation onto relative clause Restrictive (with downward quantifiers)
No journalist who signed the petition, was arrested Few students who are are fraternity members, dislike a
beer Appositive (with proper names and/or evidentials)
Michael, who beat up is girl friend, was arrested The woman, who – by the way – is wearing a pink dress,
is from Germany
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 11
Approach (4)
Judgment/evaluation task for listeners How do you rate the way the speaker
reads the following sentence? Scale from 0 to 10
0: very poor/inappropriate 10: perfect
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 12
Hypotheses
Appositive clause correlates with Physical silence Pre-final lengthening Maximally disruptive melodic pattern
Strong break > Moderate break > Neutral > Cohesion
Three factors are additive i.e. better scores as more factors reinforce
one another
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 13
Hypotheses
Restrictive clause correlates with Absence of physical silence Absence of domain-final lengthening Minimally disruptive melody
Cohesion > Neutral > Moderate break > Strong break
Factors are additive
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 14
Methods (1)
Factors Appositive vs. restrictive clause Two lexically different instantiations With / without pause (of 200 ms) With / without domain-final lengthening
(+40%) Four different melodies
Total 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 4 = 64 types Presented twice = 128 tokens per listener
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 15
Methods (2)
Materials spoken by native speaker of Dutch
Digital tape splicing for removal/insertion of lengthening and pause
PSOLA for duration manipulation and import of computer-generated melodies (imported from Fluency text-to-speech)
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 16
Methods (2)
Listeners 20 native speakers of Dutch
Presentation through loudspeakers 11-point quality judgment scale Demonstration of sound files:
GEEN journalist die de verklaring onderTEkend had, werd OPgepakt
‘No journalist who the statement signed had, was arrested’
No pause, +pause,
No length +length
Disaster: the red condition (strong break) was inadvertently generated as the blue one (neutral). It will therefore be absent from the results section.
My student Constantijn Kaland is now re-running the complete experiment for his BA thesis.
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 18
Results
First: main effects Yes / no physical pause Yes / no domain-final lengthening Type of melodic boundary marking
Second: interactions i.e. breaking factors down
Restrictive Appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Ap
pro
pri
ate
ne
ss (
0 .
.. 1
0)
66
5
6
PauseNo
Yes
Effect of physical pause
Absence of pause is preferred for restrictive clause
Presence of pause is disfavored for restrictive clause
Difference is significant Both presence and
absence of pause are OK for appositive clause
Restrictive Appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Ap
pro
pri
ate
ne
ss (
0 .
.. 1
0) 6 6
66
LengtheningNo
Yes
Effect of domain-final lengthening
Tiny effects in predicted direction
No lengthening preferred for restrictive clause
Lengthening preferred for appositive clause
Effects are statistically insignificant
restrictive appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Mea
n Ju
dged
app
ropr
iate
ness
(0.
.10
Melodycohesion: H*L
neutral: H*+L
moderate break: H* %L
Effect of melodic configuration
Order of conditions reasonably in line with prediction
Indeed: green > yellow > red for restrictive clause
But should be red > yellow > green for appositive clause
Effects are statistically insignificant
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 22
Summary of results so far
Only one effect Listeners prefer restrictive clauses
without a physical pause separating clause from antecedent
All other prosodic markings are OK for both types of clause
Now let us look at interactions
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 23
Results: interactions
Effects of (i) lengthening and (ii) melody evaluated separately for presence vs. absence of physical pause
Restrictive Appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Ap
pro
pri
ate
ne
ss (
0 .
.. 1
0)
LengtheningYes
No
Physical pause absent
Restrictive Appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Ap
pro
pri
ate
ne
ss (
0 .
.. 1
0)
LengtheningYes
No
Physical pause present
Interaction of pause and lengthening
Effect of lengthening as predicted (though not always significant) More clearly when pause is absent than when present
restrictive appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jud
ge
d a
pp
rop
ria
ten
ess
(0
..1
0
Melodycohesion: H*L
neutral: H*+L
moderate break: H* %L
restrictive appositive
Type of relative clause
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jud
ge
d a
pp
rop
ria
ten
ess
(0
..1
0
Melodycohesion: H*L
neutral: H*+L
moderate break: H* %L
Interaction of pause and melody
Preference for cohesive H*L with restrictive clause But only when pause is absent
Physical pause absent Physical pause present
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 26
Summary of results
Effects of (i) lengthening and (ii) melodic configuration are as predicted
But only if pause is absent Indicates hierarchical structure
physical pause is the primary cue lengthening and melody are subsidiary
cues
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 27
Conclusions
Appositive and restrictive relative clauses in Dutch are marked by different prosodic
boundaries, which are implemented by different
phonetic cues More specifically, …
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 28
Conclusions
… the evaluation study shows that the syntax-prosody interface should assign different prosodic boundaries to restrictive and appositive clauses: deeper boundary to appositive clause shallower boundary to restrictive clause
Therefore, …
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 29
Discussion
… quality of (Dutch) text-to-speech systems can be improved Never insert physical pause before
restrictive clause Optionally accompany by appropriate
secondary cuesDo not lengthen syllable before restrictive
clauseUse cohesive melody before restrictive clause
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 30
Discussion
But Implementation of secondary cues is not very
effective Fast and dirty implementation requires
proper use of pause only Rerun needed with strong prosodic break Challenge left for computational
linguists: How to compute status of relative clause
from text input?
1-6-2007 van Heuven, NVFW/MPI 31
The end
Thank you for your attention