Word and syllable models for German text-to-speech synthesis.

Abstract

The correct pronunciation of unknown or novel words is one of the biggest challenges for text-to-speech systems. In this paper we describe the implementation of unknown word analysis as a central component of the text analysis module in the Bell Labs German text-to-speech system. The implementation is based on a model of the morphological structure of words and on the study of the productivity of word forming affixes. One important subcomponent of the word model is a phonotactic syllable model which enables the system to handle orthographic substrings that are unaccounted for by the explicitly listed morphemes. Finally, we discuss issues for future research. 1. INTRODUCTION The correct pronunciation of unknown or novel words is one of the biggest challenges for text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Generally speaking, correct analysis and pronunciation can only be guaranteed if a direct match exists between an input string and a corresponding entry in a pronunciation dictionary or morphologi...