Phonetic Transcription Rules for Text-to-Speech Synthesis of Italian

Salza, Pier Luigi

doi:10.1159/000261853

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…All these techniques have proven to be very effective to generate plausible alternatives to canonical ones. However, rule-based approaches can still represent an effective tool to automatically obtain standard transcriptions of large corpora built ad hoc for special applications, in particular oriented to synthesis: a letter-tophone rules component is very suitable to represent allophonic and allomorphic variations [10] [11] [12] which are essential to allow segmentation and diphone extraction from an acoustic database [ 13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grapheme-to-phoneme transcription rules for Spanish, with application to automatic speech recognition and synthesis

Bonaventura

Giuliani

Almiñana

et al. 1998

Proceedings of the Workshop on Partially Automated Techniques for Transcribing Naturally Occurring Continuous Speech - Transcri

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Large phonetic corpora including both standard and variant transcriptions are available for many languages. However, applications requiring the use of dynamic vocabularies make necessary to transcribe words not present in the dictionary. Also, additional alternative pronunciations to standard forms have shown to improve recognition accuracy. Therefore, new techniques to automatically generate variants in pronunciations have been investigated and proven to be very effective. However, rule-based systems still remain useful to generate standard transcriptions not previously available or to build new corpora, oriented chiefly to synthesis applications. The present paper describes a letter-to-phone conversion system for Spanish designed to supply transcriptions to the flexible vocabulary speech recogniser and to the synthesiser, both developed at CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori relecomunicazioni), Turin, Italy. Different sets of rules are designed for the two applications. Symbols inventories also differ, although the IPA alphabet is the reference system for both. Rules have been written in ANSI C and implemented on DOS and Windows 95 and can be selectively applied. Two speech corpora have been transcribed by means of these grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules: a) the SpeechDat Spanish corpus which includes 4444 words extracted from the phonetically balanced sentences of the database b) a corpus designed to train an automatic aligner to segment units for synthesis, composed of 303 sentences (3240 words) and 338 isolated words; rule-based transcriptions of this corpus were manually corrected. The phonetic forms obtained by the rules matched satisfactorily the reference transcriptions: most mistakes on the first corpus were caused by the presence of secondary stresses in the SpeechDat transcriptions, which were not assigned by the rules, whereas errors on the synthesis corpus appeared mostly on hiatuses and on words of foreign origin. Further developments oriented to recognition can imply addition of rules to account for Latin American pronunciations (especially Mexican, Argentinian and Paraguayan); for synthesis, on the other hand, rules to represent coarticulatory phenomena at word boundaries can be implemented, in order to transcribe whole sentences.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%