In this paper we present ongoing work to produce an expressive TTS reader that can be uscd both in text and dialogue applications. The system has bcen previously used to read (English) poetry and it has now been extended to apply to short stories. The text is fully analyzed both at phonetic and phonological level, and at syntactic and semantic level. The core of the system is the Prosodic Manager which takes as input discourse structures and relations and uses this information to modify parameters for the TTS accordingly. The text is transformed into a poem-like structures, where each line corresponds to a Breath Group, scmantically and syntactically consistent. Stanzas correspond to paragraph boundaries. Analogical parameters arc related to ToBI theoretical indices but their number is doubled.
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