Phone Duration Modeling of Affective Speech Using Support Vector Regression

In speech synthesis accurate modeling of prosody is important for producing high quality synthetic speech. One of the main aspects of prosody is phone duration. Robust phone duration modeling is a prerequisite for synthesizing emotional speech with natural sounding. In this work ten phone duration models are evaluated. These models belong to well known and widely used categories of algorithms, such as the decision trees, linear regression, lazy-learning algorithms and meta-learning algorithms. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of Support Vector Regression (SVR) in phone duration modeling in the context of emotional speech. The evaluation of the eleven models is performed on a Modern Greek emotional speech database which consists of four categories of emotional speech (anger, fear, joy, sadness) plus neutral speech. The experimental results demonstrated that the SVR-based modeling outperforms the other ten models across all the four emotion categories. Specifically, the SVR model achieved an average relative reduction of 8% in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) throughout all emotional categories.