Syllable-based text-to-phoneme conversion for German

Due to the non−trivial relationship between the orthographic form and the chain of sounds in a spoken utterance in German, the text−to−phoneme conversion (TPC), as part of a text−to− speech system, is not a negligible task. Many methods that use a fixed set of rules for TPC take into account the morphological structure of words. Even though this approach results in a high accuracy, it has one major drawback: the required morphological decomposition is difficult and error prone. In this paper we propose a new approach which uses the orthographic syllable instead of morphemes. The performance compares well with the traditional method, with the added advantage that the decomposition into syllabic units can easily be achieved by using existing hyphenation algorithms implemented in currently available word processors.