 |
ISCA Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing (MULTILING 2006)Center for Language and Speech Technology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa |
 |
|
ISCA Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing (MULTILING 2006)Center for Language and Speech Technology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa |
|
The coexistence of English and French in Canada presents a number of interesting problems for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The pronunciation of Canadian French is fairly well documented and can be captured by recording a speaker of the appropriate dialect for the voice database. The desired behavior of the system in speaking the many English words, names, and expressions that can populate French text, however, is not well understood, varying from user to user and from context to context. In this paper we present an analysis of English in Canadian French TTS, examining the intelligibility and preferability of English and French pronunciations. Our results suggest that it is best to consider different modes of synthesis, ranging from near-English pronunciation of English terms to near-French, and that different tasks require different approaches to the problem.
Bibliographic reference. Tomokiyo, Laura Mayfield / Sisson, Carol Jay / Black, Alan W. (2006): "Mixed-mode multilinguality in TTS: the case of Canadian French", In MULTILING-2006, paper 023.