# A Computational Memory and Processing Model for Prosody

## 1. Introduction

Ask any lay person to imitate computer speech and you will be treated to an utterance delivered in melodic and rhythmic monotone, possibly accompanied by choppy articulation and a voice quality that is nasal and strained. In fact, current synthesized speech is far superior. Yet few would argue that synthetic and natural speech are indistinguishable. The difference, as popular impression suggests, is the relative lack of interesting and natural variability in the synthetic version. It may be traced in part to the lack of a common causal account of pitch, timing, articulation and voice quality. Intonation and stress are usually linked to the linguistic and information structure of text. Features such as pause location and word duration are linked mainly to the speaker’s cognitive and expressive capacities, and pitch range, intensity, voice quality and articulation to her physiological and affective state.

In this paper, I describe a production model that attributes pitch and timing to the essential operations of a speaker’s working memory – the storage and retrieval of information. Simulations with this model produce synthetic speech in three of the prosodic styles likely to be associated with attentional and memory differences: a child-like exaggerated prosody for limited recall; a more adult but still expressive style for mid-range capacities; and a knowledgeable style for maximum recall. The same model also produces individual differences within each style, owing to its stochastic storage algorithm. The ability to produce both individual and genre variations supports its eventual use in prosthetic, entertainment and information applications, especially in the production of reading materials for the blind and the use of computer-based autonomous and communicative agents.

## 2. A Memory Model for Prosody

Prosody organizes spoken text into phrases, and highlights its most salient components with pitch accents, distinctive pitch contours applied to the word. Pitch accents are both attentional and propositional. Their very use indicates salience; their particular form conveys a proposition about the words they mark. For example, speakers typically use a high pitch accent (denoted as H\*) to mark salient information that they believe to be new to the addressee. Conversely, when they believe the addressee is already aware of the information, they will typically de-accent it or, if it is salient, apply a low pitch accent (L\*). Re-stated as a commentary on working memory, the H\* accent conveys the speaker’s belief that the addressee can not retrieve the accented information from working memory. De-accenting implicitly conveys the opposite expectation. The L\* accent does so explicitly. This view predicts different speaking styles as a consequence of the speaker’s beliefs about an addressee’s storage and retrieval capacities. For example, it ascribes the exaggerated intonation that adults use with infants and young children, to the adults’ belief that the child’s knowledge and attention are extremely limited; therefore, he needs clear and explicit prosodic instructions as to how to process language and interaction.

The model of working memory I use shows how retrieval limits can determine the information status of an item as either given or new, and therefore, its corresponding prosody. It was developed and implemented by Thomas Landauer and models working memory as a periodic three dimensional Cartesian space, the focus of attention via a moving search and storage pointer that traverses the space in a slow random walk, and retrieval ability via a search radius that defines the size of a region whose center is the pointer’s current location. Search for familiar items proceeds outward from the pointer, one city block per time step, up to the distance specified by the search radius.

As a consequence of the random walk, incoming stimuli are stored in a spatial pattern that is locally random but globally coherent. That is, temporal proximity in the stimuli begets spatial proximity in the model. It contrasts with stack models of memory that are strictly chronological, and semantic spaces in which distance is conceptual rather than temporal. Most importantly, it is a valid computational model of attention and working memory (AWM, from here on). Landauer used it to reproduce the well-known learning phenomena of recency and frequency, in which subjects tend to recall stimuli encountered most recently or most frequently. It has since been used by Walker to show that resource-bound dialog partners will make a proposition explicit when it is not retrievable or inferable, despite having been previously mentioned.

Retrieval in AWM is the process of matching the current stimulus to the contents of the region centered around the pointer. The search radius determines the size of this region and therefore is the main AWM simulation parameter. If a match is found within the search region, the stimulus is classified as given, otherwise, it is new. Figure 1 illustrates this with the simple example of filled and unfilled circles, a 4x4 AWM space, and a search radius of one. At the center of the search region is the current stimulus, a filled circle. Because the region contains no other filled circles, the stimulus is classed as new. Had the stimulus been an unfilled circle, it would have instead been classed as given because a match is retrievable within the search radius. Or, alternatively, had the search radius been two instead of one, a matching filled circle would have been found, and the stimulus again classed as given.

The ability to identify given and new items makes AWM a useful producer of prosody based on this distinction. Ostensibly, it shows how a speaker’s processing affects her prosody. However, although the working memory belongs to the speaker, its operation and determinations may reflect the speaker’s own retrieval capacities, her estimate of those of the addressee, or a mixture of both. That is, a speaker can always adapt her style (prosodic and lexical) to the needs of a less knowledgeable or capable addressee. A cooperative and communicative speaker will usually do this. However, she cannot model a retrieval capacity greater than her own – her own knowledge and attentional limits always constitute the upper bounds on her performance.

## 3. System design

The AWM component is embedded in a software implementation, Loq, that takes a text-to-speech approach. As shown Figure 2, the input to AWM is text, the output is speech. Therefore, Loq models read rather than spontaneous speech. Text comprehension is the process of searching for a match. Uttering the text is a question of mapping the search process and its results to prosodic features and sending the prosodically annotated text to the synthesizer.

Like many commercial text-to-speech synthesizers, the text structure is analyzed before prosody is assigned. However, the Loq analysis is richer. It takes advantage of on-line linguistic databases to approximate the speaker’s knowledge of English semantics, pronunciation and usage. The structural analysis is richer as well, providing both grammatical structure (subject, verb, object), empty categories (ellipses, for example) and information about clausal attachment. The main qualitative difference is that Loq interposes a model of limited attention and working memory between the text analysis and prosodic mapping components.

### 3.1. Matching

For the example in Figure 1, the matching criterion is binary and simple – a circle is either filled or unfilled. However, language is many more times complex, and matches may occur for a variety of features, some of which are more informative than others. The matching criteria used in Loq attempt to distill from the literature (e.g., ) the most relevant and prevalent ways that items in memory prime for the current stimulus, and by the same token, the ways in which the current stimulus can function as a retrieval cue. In other words, they gauge the mutual information between the current stimulus and previously stored items.

Altogether, Loq tests for matches on twenty-four semantic, syntactic, collocation, grammatical and acoustical features. Each test contributes to the total match score, which is then compared to a threshold. If it is below, the search continues; if above, it stops. As shown in Figure 3, matches on any criterion express priming, and scores above the threshold constitute a match sufficient to stop the search even before it reaches the edge of the search region. Because some tests are more informative than others, a high score can reflect the positive outcome of many un-informative tests, or of one that is definitive. Thus, in the current ordering, co-reference ensures a match, while structural parallelism in and of itself does not.

### 3.2. Input

The matching criteria determine the form and kind of information in the text input. As with commercial synthesizers, this includes part of speech tagging. Loq uses the output of Lingsoft’s ENGCG (English Constraint Grammar) software which provides both tags and phrase structure information. However, reliable automatic means for identifying other information, such as grammatical clauses, empty categories, attachment and co-reference do not yet exist. Therefore, this information was entered by hand.

The Loq software turns the parsed and annotated text into a sequence of tokens that assembles clauses in a bottom up fashion, starting with the word and followed by the syntactic and grammatical clauses to which it belongs. This models the reader’s assembly of the words into meaningful syntactic and grammatical groupings.<sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1Adapting this for a spontaneous speaker would proceed in reverse, from the concept, to grammatical roles, syntactic phrases and finally, the words.

To facilitate the matching process, the text is also augmented with information from the WordNet database for semantic comparisons, a pronunciation database for acoustical comparisons and the Thorndike-Lorge and Kucera-Francis for word frequency counts<sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2As provided in the Oxford Psycholinguistic Database. to scale the match score by the prior probability for the language. The WordNet synonym indices were assigned by hand. However, all subsequent semantic comparisons using WordNet are automatic as required by the matching process.

### 3.3. Mapping

I have described how AWM produces the L\* accent (or none) for retrievable items, and H\* for new ones. However, there are more than two pitch accents – Pierrehumbert et al. identify six<sup>3</sup><sup>3</sup>3L\*, H\*, L+H\*, L\*+H, H+L\*, H\*+L. – and more components to prosody. Obtaining them from one model first requires an adjustment such that given or new status is determined from the effect of the stimulus on the region as a whole, as follows: The result of any one comparison affects the “state” of the item to which the stimulus is compared. State is simply defined – a L annotation records a match most any criterion,<sup>4</sup><sup>4</sup>4Some criteria are parasitic and only contribute to the score in combination with other criteria. and a H annotation records a match score of zero. Thus, the comparison process registers both priming and a true match. Both receive L annotations, but only a match whose score exceeds the threshold stops the search.

A pitch accent is then derived by comparing the contents of the search radius before and after the matching process. Majority rules apply such that the annotation with the higher count becomes the defining tone. If both the before and after configurations are composed mainly of L annotations, the accent form is L+L, which becomes the L\* accent. However, if there is a change, for example, from a L to H majority, the accent form is L+H. The interpretation of L+L is, roughly, that a familiar item was expected and provided. Likewise, the interpretation for L+H is that a familiar item was expected but an unexpected one provided.

To complete the bitonal derivation, Loq treats the location of the main tone as a categorical reflection of the magnitude of the effect of the stimulus. If the stimulus changes the annotations for the majority of items in the search region, the second tone is the main tone. Otherwise, it is the first. This schema produces the six pitch accents identified by Pierrehumbert et al. More generally, the annotation schema provides the model with a simple form of feedback – the results of prior processing persist and contribute to a bias that affects future processing.

The pitch accent mapping illustrates the main features of the prosodic mapping in general. First, all mappings reflect the activity and state within the region defined by the search radius. Second, they express some aspects of prosody as a plausible consequence of search and storage. For example, storage and search times are mapped to word and pause duration. However, others – for example, the bitonal derivation– are, at best, coherent with the operation and purpose of the model and not contradicted by the current (sparse) data on the relation of cognitive capacity to the prosody of read speech. In all, the mapping from AWM activity and state produces intonational categories (pitch accent, phrase accent and boundary tone) and their prominence, word duration, pause duration and the pitch range of an intonational phrase.

## 4. Results

Although simulations were run using text from three different genres (fiction, radio broadcast, rhymed poetry), two and three dimensional AWM spaces and three memory sizes (small, mid-range and large), most of the prosodic output was correlated with the search radius. Therefore, the results reported here are for the mid-range two-dimensional memory (22x22) and for the news report text only (one paragraph, 68 words.) Five simulations were run for each radius.

True to the attentional predictions, Figure 5 shows that as the search radius increases, the mean number of unaccented words increases as well, while the number of H\* accents decreases. Under the current mapping, pitch accent prominence is a function the distance at which the search stops and the number of comparisons performed prior to stopping. This produces a decrease in the mean prominence as the search radius increases (Figure 6). These patterns contribute to the lively and child-like intonation produced for the smallest radii (1 and 2), the expressive but more subdued intonation for the mid-range radii (3-8) and flatter intonation of the higher radii.

The naturalness of synthetic prosody is difficult to evaluate via in perceptual tests. However, informal comments from listeners revealed that while the three styles were recognizable and the prosody more natural-sounding than the commercial default, it was best for shorter sections rather than for the passages as a whole. A comparison with the natural prosody for the same text (the BU Corpus radio newscasts) showed that when the simulations agreed on pitch accent location and type, they tended to disagree on boundary location and type, mostly because the Loq simulations produced many more phrase breaks than the natural speaker.

## 5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Loq is a production model. It produces prosody as the consequence of cognitive processing as modeled by the AWM component. Its focus on retrieval makes it a performance model as well, demonstrating that prosody is not determined solely by the text. It produces three recognizable styles that appear to correlate with retrieval capacities as defined by the search radius: child-like (for radii of 1 and2), adult expressive (for radii between 3 and 8) and knowledgeable (for radii higher than 8). This is a step towards producing prosody that is both expressive and natural and, in addition, specific to the speaker,

Currently, the main problem is that the prosody is not entirely cohesive within one text. Therefore, one next step is to explore variations on the mapping of AWM activity and state to prosodic features. More distant work includes extending the model to incorporate other influences, especially the influence of physiology. This may be the key to producing more than three styles, and to incorporating both the dynamics and constraints that will produce consistently natural-sounding speech.