<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C92-3128">
  <Title>Accenting and Deaccenting: a Declarative Approach</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> One of the problems that must be addressed by a text-to-speech system is the derivation of pitch accent, marking the distinction between &amp;quot;given&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; information in an utterance. This paper discusses a language-independent approach to this problem, which is based on focus-accent theory (e.g. Ladd 1978, Gussenhoven 1984, t3aart t987), and implemented in my program PRos-a. This program has been developed as part of the ESPRIT-project POLYGLOT, and provides an integrated environment for modelling the syntax-to-prosody interface of a multi-lingual text-to-speech system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The program operates in the following manner. First, the input text is parsed using a variation of context-free phrase-structure rules, attgmented with information about &amp;quot;argument&amp;quot; structure of phrases. Next, the syntactic representation is mapped onto a metrical tree. The metrical tree is then used to derive locations for pitch accents, as well as phonological and intonational phrase boundaries. null in this approach, differences between law guages are modelled entirely by the syntactic rules. Also, the system is strictly declaratiw:, in the sense that once a piece of information is added by a rule, it is never removed. In this respect, our approach differs radically from systems which make use of derivational rules (e.g. Quend &amp; Kager 1992). Such systems tend to become extremely complex, hard to verify and almost impossible to maintain or extend (Quenb &amp; Dirksen 1990, Dirksen &amp; Quen6 in press). By contrast, in PROS-3 there is a conspicuous relation between theory and implementation, attd the program can be extended in a number of ways) Below, 1 will focus on two major rules from focus-accent theory: Default Accent and l/.hythn~ic Deaccenting. The tirst rule is used to model deaccenting of &amp;quot;given&amp;quot; information, e.g. the pronouns it, her and cs in the English, l)utch and German sentences of (1), (2) and (3), respectively.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (1)a I should have read a BOOK b I should have READ it (2)a ik had een BOEK moeten 1.ezen b ik had her moeten LEZEN (3)a ich hatte ein BUCII lesen sollen b ich hatte es LESEN sollen The second rule is used to provide rtlythmical alternations between accented and deaecented material in certain well-defined contexts, as is illustrated by the sentences of (4). (4)a she is a NICE GIRL 1One extension we `are currently considering is the `addition of some kind of discourse model (`along the lines of Hirschberg 1990) to more adequately model the &amp;quot;given new&amp;quot; distinction. Also, some prelimin,ary work tt,as been done on phonological p,arsing (e.g. Coleman 1990, 1991; see ,also his paper in this volume) to derive word stress `and temporal structure of words.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> ACTES DE COLING-92, NA1VH~S. 23-28 AOUr 1992 8 6 5 I'ROC. OF COLING-92, NANTES, AU6.23-28, 1992 b she is REALLY NICE c she is a REALLY nice GIRL d she is REALLY a NICE GIRL This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly introduces focus-accent theory and how it may be implemented. Next, sections 3 and 4 discuss Default Accent and Rhythmic Deaccenting, respectively. In section 5, we make some concluding remarks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>