Concept-to-speech synthesis by phonological structure matching

Abstract

This paper presents a new way of generating synthetic-speech waveforms from a linguistic description. The algorithm is presented as a proposed solution to the speech-generation problem in a concept-to-speech system. Off-line, a database of recorded speech is annotated so as to produce a phonological tree for each sentence in that database. Synthesis is performed by generating a phonological tree called the target tree, and searching the database of trees to find nodes that are the same in both trees. A search strategy using target and concatenation costs is then used to find the optimal sequence of units for the target sentence. This paper explains this algorithm, compares it with existing algorithms, and concludes with a discussion of future directions.