Designing French Tale Corpora for Entertaining Text To Speech Synthesis

AbstractText and speech corpora for training a tale telling robot have been designed, recorded and annotated. The aim of these corpora is to study expressive storytelling behaviour, and to help in designing expressive prosodic and co-verbal variations for the artificial storyteller). A set of 89 children tales in French serves as a basis for this work. The tales annotation principles and scheme are described, together with the corpus description in terms of coverage and inter-annotator agreement. Automatic analysis of a new tale with the help of this corpus and machine learning is discussed. Metrics for evaluation of automatic annotation methods are discussed. A speech corpus of about 1 hour, with 12 tales has been recorded and aligned and annotated. This corpus is used for predicting expressive prosody in children tales, above the level of the sentence.