A Context-based Numeral Reading Technique for Text to Speech Systems

This paper presents a novel technique for context based numeral reading in Indian language text to speech systems. The model uses a set of rules to determine the context of the numeral pronunciation and is being integrated with the waveform concatenation technique to produce speech out of the input text in Indian languages. For this purpose, the three Indian languages Odia, Hindi and Bengali are considered. To analyze the performance of the proposed technique, a set of experiments are performed considering different context of numeral pronunciations and the results are compared with existing syllable-based technique. The results obtained from different experiments shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique in producing intelligible speech out of the entered text utterances compared to the existing technique even with very less storage and execution time

Automatic Segmentation of Manipuri (Meiteilon) Word into Syllabic Units

The work of automatic segmentation of a Manipuri language (or Meiteilon) word into syllabic units is demonstrated in this paper. This language is a scheduled Indian language of Tibeto-Burman origin, which is also a very highly agglutinative language. This language usages two script: a Bengali script and Meitei Mayek (Script). The present work is based on the second script. An algorithm is designed so as to identify mainly the syllables of Manipuri origin word. The result of the algorithm shows a Recall of 74.77, Precision of 91.21 and F-Score of 82.18 which is a reasonable score with the first attempt of such kind for this language.Comment: 12 Pages, 5 Tables See the link http://airccse.org/journal/jcsit/0612csit11.pd

Multi-Agent Simulation of Emergence of Schwa Deletion Pattern in Hindi

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in multi-agent simulation techniques for exploring the nature of language change. However, a lack of appropriate validation of simulation experiments against real language data often calls into question the general applicability of these methods in modeling realistic language change. We try to address this issue here by making an attempt to model the phenomenon of schwa deletion in Hindi through a multi-agent simulation framework. The pattern of Hindi schwa deletion and its diachronic nature are well studied, not only out of general linguistic inquiry, but also to facilitate Hindi grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, which is a preprocessing step to text-to-speech synthesis. We show that under certain conditions, the schwa deletion pattern observed in modern Hindi emerges in the system from an initial state of no deletion. The simulation framework described in this work can be extended to model other phonological changes as well.Language Change, Linguistic Agent, Language Game, Multi-Agent Simulation, Schwa Deletion

Urdu intonation

The current study is an analysis of an Urdu speech corpus using a Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription system to develop a model of Urdu intonation. The analysis indicates that Urdu has three pitch accents (L*, L*+H, H*) and boundary tones associated to two phrase types: accentual phrase (AP) boundaries (Ha, La) and intonational phrase (IP) boundaries (L%, H%, LH%). The AP is a pitch bearing unit on a single word, or more than one word in the context of (a) izāfat, (b) conjunctive vāo, (c) case markers, (d) complex postpositions, and (e) complex verbs. Moreover, this study also investigates the tonal structure of declarative, interrogative (wh-questions, yes/no-questions), and imperative (semi-honorific, polite honorific) sentences in neutral focus context using 50 utterances produced by ten speakers. Results indicate that (i) all declarative sentences consist of a series of APs, represented as (aL) L* (H) Ha, except the sentence final AP, represented as (H*) L%. (ii) wh-questions are different from their corresponding declaratives in terms of pitch range and the final boundary tone; (iii) imperatives are different form their corresponding declaratives in terms of final boundary tone

Marathi Speech Synthesis: A Review

This paper seeks to reveal the various aspects of Marathi Speech synthesis. This paper has reviewed research development in the International languages as well as Indian languages and then centering on the development in Marathi languages with regard to other Indian languages. It is anticipated that this work will serve to explore more in Marathi language. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15064

Research report on Bengali NLP engine for TTS

Includes bibliographical references (page 5).This report describes the Bengali NLP processor for TTS, along with the challenges faced in developing the NLP processor.Firoj Ala

Text to speech for Bangla language using festival

Includes bibliographical references (page 6-7).In this paper, we present a Text to Speech (TTS) synthesis system for Bangla language using the open-source Festival TTS engine. Festival is a complete TTS synthesis system, with components supporting front-end processing of the input text, language modeling, and speech synthesis using its signal processing module. The Bangla TTS system proposed here, creates the voice data for festival, and additionally extends festival using its embedded scheme scripting interface to incorporate Bangla language support. Festival is a oncatenative TTS system using diphone or other unit selection speech units. Our TTS implementation uses two different kinds of these concatenative methods supported in Festival: unit selection and multisyn unit selection. The function of a Text-to-Speech system is to convert some language text into its spoken equivalent by a series of modules. These modules, constituting the TTS system are described in detail which is very much helpful for future development. Finally, the quality of synthesized speech is assessed in terms of acceptability and intelligibility