We present a first version of a filter dictionary for use in a computer-telephony text-to-speech synthesis system. The aim of the filter dictionary was to provide a lexicon that was compact, fast and had broader coverage than the standard dictionary used to create it. Correct phonemic transcriptions and lexical stress assignment were both required for a transcription to be deemed accurate. The approach taken here guarantees 100% accurate coverage of the original dictionary, but also gives 93% accurate transcription of the expected coverage of novel words. Lexical stress and the phonemic transcription were retrieved in one pass, resulting in an extremely fast system. We also allowed user-definition to retain accuracy for non-standard transcriptions. This algorithm was developed for British English, but could be applied to other languages.
Cite as: Faulkner, D., Bryant, C. (1998) Efficient lexical retrieval for English text-to-speech synthesis. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0091, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-9
@inproceedings{faulkner98_icslp,
author={Daniel Faulkner and Charles Bryant},
title={{Efficient lexical retrieval for English text-to-speech synthesis}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0091},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-9}
}