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<Paper uid="P86-1022">
  <Title>THE CONTRIBUTION OF PARSING TO PROSODIC PHRASING IN AN EXPERIMENTAL TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYSTEM</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="151" end_page="151" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have described an on-line experimental system that uses prosody rules to infer prosodic phrasing from constituent structure, grammatical functions, and length considerations. The system contains three modules: a deterministic parser, a set of prosodic phrasing rules, and an algorithm to convert the output of the prosodic phrasing rules into signals for the Bell Labs text-to-speech system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In developing the experiment, our intention was to build a working system that would allow us to test various hypotheses about the connections between syntax and prosodic phrasing in human speech and to upgrade the prosody of existing synthetic speech. The modularity of our system enables us to alter each module independently in order to test different hypotheses. For example, the parser can be altered to reflect the difference between verbs that require a complementizer before a sentential complement and those that do not. 13 This alteration is independent of 13. Fidditch represents this as a difference in the level of the com- plement sentence. Verbs that require a complementizer take an S-bar complement, while verbs that do not require a com- plementizer take an S complement with an optional that preceding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> the workings of the prosody system or the prosody conversion rules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The existence of this prosody system makes the problem areas in the syntax-prosody relation more tractable by allowing online testing of a large body of data. For example, the prosodically different character of the two classes of complement sentences discussed above became apparent after several examples from each class were run through the system. We therefore feel we have built a tool that will aid in designing better approximations of sentence prosody as it relates to syntacnc structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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