Levels of stress

[Morten H]

When I look in the unilex dictionary, in the utterance structure of the database sentences (in the utt-folder) and also when running sentences through the so-called Korin’s script, I see four levels of stress. E.g. (“grandnephew” nn (((g r a n d) 1) ((n e) 2) ((f y uu) 3))) and (“accentuated” vbd (((@ k) 0) ((s e n) 1) ((ch uw) 0) ((ei t) 2) ((i d) 0))) Does this mean that at synthesis time the unit selection in Festival distinguishes between these four levels (giving, in theory at least, eight possible stress combinations per diphone)? Or are some of these stress levels somehow collapsed? And if they are collapsed, is it possible to know if level 2 (and 3) is collapsed into level 0 or into level 1?

[Simon]

The target cost function collapses all levels of stress (1,2,3) into a single level (1 = “stressed”).

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