HYBRID SYLLABIFICATION AND LETTER-TO-PHONE CONVERSION FOR TTS SYNTHESIS

The presence of the natural language processing (NLP) stage in a text-tospeech (TTS) synthesis system is an essential condition for obtaining a good naturalness of the synthesized speech in a given language, starting from unrestricted input text. In this paper we address two important NLP issues for a Romanian TTS system: automatic syllabification, necessary for lexical stress assignment and prosody generation, and letter-to-phone (L2P) conversion of the input text. The first algorithm is built on a hybrid strategy, using a minimal set of general rules, followed by a statistical (data driven) approach, while the second one uses a set of phonetic transcription rules that work aligned with the correctly syllabified words. Moreover, we demonstrate that lexical stress prediction can help the L2P process, by solving some additional ambiguities.

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