INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Automatic Syllabification for Danish Text-to-Speech Systems

Jeppe Beck (1), Daniela Braga (1), João Nogueira (2), Miguel Sales Dias (1), Luis Coelho (3)

(1) Microsoft Language Development Center, Portugal
(2) University of Lisbon, Portugal
(3) Polytechnic Institute of Oporto, Portugal

In this paper, a rule-based automatic syllabifier for Danish is described using the Maximal Onset Principle. Prior success rates of rule-based methods applied to Portuguese and Catalan syllabification modules were on the basis of this work. The system was implemented and tested using a very small set of rules. The results gave rise to 96.9% and 98.7% of word accuracy rate, contrary to our initial expectations, being Danish a language with a complex syllabic structure and thus difficult to be rule-driven. Comparison with data-driven syllabification system using artificial neural networks showed a higher accuracy rate of the former system.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Beck, Jeppe / Braga, Daniela / Nogueira, João / Dias, Miguel Sales / Coelho, Luis (2009): "Automatic syllabification for danish text-to-speech systems", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 1287-1290.