Assigning phrase breaks from part-of-speech sequences.

Abstract

One of the important stages in the process of turning unmarked text into speech is the assignment of appropriate phrase break boundaries. Phrase break boundaries are important to later modules including accent assignment, duration control and pause insertion. A number of different algorithms have been proposed for such a task, ranging from the simple to the complex. These different algorithms require different information such as part of speech tags, syntax and even semantic understanding of the text. Obviously these requirements come at differing costs and it is important to trade off difficulty in finding particular input features versus accuracy of the model.