Some Aspects of Text-To-Speech Conversion by Rules

Abstract

<p> A critical survey of the important features and characteristics of some existing Text-to-Speech Conversion (TSC) system by rules is given. The necessary algorithms, not available for these systems in the literature, have been formulated providing the basic philosophies underlying these systems. A new algorithm TESCON for a TSC system by rules is developed without implementation details. TESCON is primarily concerned with the preprocessing and linguistic analysis of an input text in English orthography. For the first time, the use of function-content word concepts is fully utilized to identify the potential head-words in phrases. Stress, duration modification and pause insertions are suggested as part of the rule schemes. TESCON is general in nature and is fully compatible with a true TSC system.</p>