Morphological Analysis for a German Text-to-Speech System

A central problem in speech synthesis with unrestricted vocabulary is the automatic derivation of correct pronunciation from the graphemic form of a text. The software module GRAPHON was developed to perform this conversion for German and is currently being extended by a morphological analysis component. This analysis is based on a morph lexicon and a set of rules and structural descriptions for German word-forms. It provides each text input item with an individual characterization such that the phonological, syntactic, and prosodic components may operate upon it. This systematic approach thus serves to minimize the number of wrong transcriptions and at the same time lays the foundation for the generation of stress and intonation patterns, yielding more intelligible, natural-sounding, and generally acceptable synthetic speech.