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Basic Research and Implementation Decisions for a Text-to-Speech Synthesis System in Romanian

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Abstract

Speech synthesis is one of the most language-dependent domains of speech technology. In particular, the natural language processing stage of a text-to-speech (TTS) system contains the largest part of the linguistic knowledge for a given language. In this respect, one can state that building a high-quality TTS system for a new language involves many theoretical and technical challenges. Especially, extensive studies must exist (or be done) at the linguistic level, in order to endow the system with the most relevant language information; this requirement represents an essential condition to obtain a true naturalness of the synthesized speech, starting from unrestricted input text. This paper presents fundamental research and the related implementation issues in developing a complete TTS system in Romanian, emphasizing the language particularities and their influence on improving the language processing stage efficiency. The first section describes our standpoint on TTS synthesis as well as the overall architecture of our TTS system. The next sections formulate several important tasks of the natural language processing stage (input text preprocessing, letter-to-phone conversion, acoustic database preparation) and discuss the design philosophy of the corresponding modules, implementation decisions and evaluation experiments. A distinct section is devoted to an acoustic-phonetic study that assisted the phone-set selection and acoustic database generation. The paper ends with conclusions and a description of the work that is currently in progress at other levels of the TTS system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Speech Technology and Signal Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania

    Dragos Burileanu

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  1. Dragos Burileanu
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Burileanu, D. Basic Research and Implementation Decisions for a Text-to-Speech Synthesis System in Romanian. International Journal of Speech Technology 5, 211–225 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020236605813

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