Text Preprocessing for Speech Synthesis

In this paper we describe our text preprocessing modules for English text-to-speech synthesis. These modules comprise rule-based text normalization subsuming sentence segmentation and normalization of non-standard words, statistical part-of-speech tagging, and statistical syllabification, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and word stress assignment relying in parts on rule-based morphological analysis

Neural Word Segmentation with Rich Pretraining

Neural word segmentation research has benefited from large-scale raw texts by leveraging them for pretraining character and word embeddings. On the other hand, statistical segmentation research has exploited richer sources of external information, such as punctuation, automatic segmentation and POS. We investigate the effectiveness of a range of external training sources for neural word segmentation by building a modular segmentation model, pretraining the most important submodule using rich external sources. Results show that such pretraining significantly improves the model, leading to accuracies competitive to the best methods on six benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201

A Factoid Question Answering System for Vietnamese

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set.Comment: In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, Franc

Improving the quality of Gujarati-Hindi Machine Translation through part-of-speech tagging and stemmer-assisted transliteration

Machine Translation for Indian languages is an emerging research area. Transliteration is one such module that we design while designing a translation system. Transliteration means mapping of source language text into the target language. Simple mapping decreases the efficiency of overall translation system. We propose the use of stemming and part-of-speech tagging for transliteration. The effectiveness of translation can be improved if we use part-of-speech tagging and stemming assisted transliteration.We have shown that much of the content in Gujarati gets transliterated while being processed for translation to Hindi language