Fourth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis August 29 - September 1, 2001 Perthshire, Scotland

Rare events and closed domains: Two delicate concepts in speech synthesis

Bernd Möbius

Institute of Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Germany

One of the most serious challenges for speech synthesis is the systematic treatment of events in language and speech that are known to have low frequencies of occurrence. The problems that extremely unbalanced frequency distributions pose for rule-based or data-driven models are ofien underestimated or even unrecognized. This paper discusses these problems in the contexts of morphology, syllabification, segmental duration and unit selection, and also suggests possible solutions. The design of databases for restricted application domains, where the distributions of linguistic and phonetic factors are lcnown, is also critically reviewed.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Möbius, Bernd (2001): "Rare events and closed domains: Two delicate concepts in speech synthesis ", In SSW4-2001, paper 117.