Prosody Analysis of Thai Emotion Utterances

Abstract

Emotion speech synthesis is the most important process to generate the naturalness of utterances in text-to-speech system. The interjection utterances in Thai language are employed in express a number of emotions. This paper presents a study of the prosody parameters of the interjection utterances clipped from Thai utterances in the movies. The Thai emotional utterances from various movies have been analyzed and classified into 8 emotional types consisting of neutral, anger, happiness, sadness, fear, pleasant, unpleasant and surprise. The classification of prosodic features is based on fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration. This paper compares the prosodic features in the Thai language and other languages including English, Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic. The comparison results show that there are significant differences of prosodic features for each emotion in each language. Therefore, the quality of a text-to-speech system is based on the prosodic analysis of each language.