A speech synthesis-by-rule system for Modern Standard Chinese
This thesis discusses the development of a Chinese speech synthesis-by-rule system and presents the structure and features of the system. The aim of the work is to produce highly intelligible standard Chinese speech with natural sounding intonation from unrestricted Chinese text, using a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The synthesis system accepts standard Chinese Pinyin text as input, either from a conventional keyboard or from a computer readable file. Text to detailed phonetic description conversion is carried out in three steps: 1) application of a group of phonological and phonetic rules to convert Pinyin text into demisyllable strings; 2) conversion of the demisyllables into a succession of phonetic elements using a dictionary look-up strategy; 3) application of prosodic rules at different levels. Two specific features of this text-to-phonetic conversion system are: the use of a specially designed demisyllable dictionary which permits an effective and reliable way of deriving phonetic elements from text, and the implementation of a new generative intonation framework which enables a very wide variety of natural sounding fundamental frequency contours to be generated automatically. The acoustic-phonetic
Shi, Bo
Linguistics
A speech synthesis-by-rule system for Modern Standard Chinese. This thesis discusses the development of a Chinese speech synthesis-by-rule system and presents the structure and features of the system. The aim of the work is to produce highly intelligible standard Chinese speech with natural sounding intonation from unrestricted Chinese text, using a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The synthesis system accepts standard Chinese Pinyin text as input, either from a conventional keyboard or from a computer readable file. Text to detailed phonetic description conversion is carried out in three steps: 1) application of a group of phonological and phonetic rules to convert Pinyin text into demisyllable strings; 2) conversion of the demisyllables into a succession of phonetic elements using a dictionary look-up strategy; 3) application of prosodic rules at different levels. Two specific features of this text-to-phonetic conversion system are: the use of a specially designed demisyllable dictionary which permits an effective and reliable way of deriving phonetic elements from text, and the implementation of a new generative intonation framework which enables a very wide variety of natural sounding fundamental frequency contours to be generated automatically. The acoustic-phonetic
speech_synthesis rule system modern_standard chinese discus development chinese speech_synthesis rule system present structure feature system aim_work produce highly intelligible standard chinese speech natural sound intonation unrestricted chinese text use parallel formant speech synthesis system accept standard chinese text input either conventional computer readable file text detailed phonetic description conversion carry step application group phonological phonetic rule convert text string conversion succession phonetic element use_dictionary look strategy application prosodic rule different_level specific_feature text phonetic conversion system use specially design dictionary permit effective reliable way derive phonetic element text implementation new generative intonation framework enables wide_variety natural sound fundamental_frequency contour generate automatically acoustic phonetic