A bi-lingual Mandarin-to-taiwanese text-to-speech system

In this paper, we describe a bi-lingual Text-to-speech (TTS) translational system, which converts Chinese Text into Taiwanese speech, by using bilingual lexicon information. This TTS system is organized as three functional modules, which contain a text analysis module, a prosody module, and a waveform synthesis module. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the text analysis and tone-sandhi modules. About 90% labeling accuracy and 65% tone-sandhi accuracy can be achieved. With this proposed Taiwanese TTS component, a talking electronic lexicon system can be built to help those who want to learn these 2 languages.

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