Machine-readable dictionaries in text-to-speech systems
Judith L. Klavans, Evelyne Tzoukermann · 1994
This paper presents the results of an experiment using machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) and corpora for building concatenative units for text to speech (TTS) systems. Theoretical questions concerning the nature of phonemic data in dictionaries are raised; phonemic dictionary data is viewed as a representative corpus over which to extract n-gram phonemic frequencies in the language. Dictionary data are compared to corpus data, and phoneme inventories are evaluated for coverage. A methodology is defined to compute phonemic n-grams for incorporation into a TTS system.