A unified approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for the plattos slovenian text-to-speech system

This article presents a new unified approach to modeling grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for the PLATTOS Slovenian text-to-speech system. A cascaded structure consisting of several successive processing steps is proposed for the aim of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Processing foreign words and rules for the post-processing of phonetic transcriptions are also incorporated in the engine. The grapheme-to-phoneme conversion engine is flexible, efficient, and appropriate for multilingual text-to-speech systems. The grapheme-to-phoneme conversion process is described via finite-state machine formalism. The engine developed for Slovenian language can be integrated into various applications but can be even more efficiently integrated into architectures based on finite-state machine formalisms. Provided the necessary language resources are available, the presented approach can also be used for other languages