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From data to speech: a general approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2001

M. THEUNE
Affiliation:
IPO, Center for User-System Interaction, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail: M.Theune@tue.nl, E.A.M.Klabbers@tue.nl, J.R.d.Pijper@tue.nl, E.J.Krahmer@tue.nl
E. KLABBERS
Affiliation:
IPO, Center for User-System Interaction, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail: M.Theune@tue.nl, E.A.M.Klabbers@tue.nl, J.R.d.Pijper@tue.nl, E.J.Krahmer@tue.nl
J. R. DE PIJPER
Affiliation:
IPO, Center for User-System Interaction, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail: M.Theune@tue.nl, E.A.M.Klabbers@tue.nl, J.R.d.Pijper@tue.nl, E.J.Krahmer@tue.nl
E. KRAHMER
Affiliation:
IPO, Center for User-System Interaction, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands; e-mail: M.Theune@tue.nl, E.A.M.Klabbers@tue.nl, J.R.d.Pijper@tue.nl, E.J.Krahmer@tue.nl
J. ODIJK
Affiliation:
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Flanders Language Valley 50, 8900 Ieper, Belgium; e-mail: Jan.Odijk@lhs.be

Abstract

We present a data-to-speech system called D2S, which can be used for the creation of data-to-speech systems in different languages and domains. The most important characteristic of a data-to-speech system is that it combines language and speech generation: language generation is used to produce a natural language text expressing the system's input data, and speech generation is used to make this text audible. In D2S, this combination is exploited by using linguistic information available in the language generation module for the computation of prosody. This allows us to achieve a better prosodic output quality than can be achieved in a plain text-to-speech system. For language generation in D2S, the use of syntactically enriched templates is guided by knowledge of the discourse context, while for speech generation pre-recorded phrases are combined in a prosodically sophisticated manner. This combination of techniques makes it possible to create linguistically sound but efficient systems with a high quality language and speech output.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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