Abstract
Current TTS systems usually represent a certain standard of a given language, regional or social variation is barely reflected. In this paper, we describe certain strategies for modeling language varieties on the basis of a common language resource, in particular Austrian varieties from German sources. The goal is to find optimal procedures in order to represent these differences with minimal efforts in annotation and processing. We delimit the discussion to the lower levels of the transformation of linguistic information – phonetic encoding. One question is if it is necessary or desirable to aim at maximal accurateness of the phonetic transcriptions. We will show that while certain differences could in principle be captured by the context within the speech data, other differences definitely have to be re-modelled, since they either involve ambiguous correspondences, or the string of phones is different in such a way that automatic procedures such as alignment or unit selection would be negatively affected, hence degrade the overall quality of the synthesized speech.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Black, A.W., Lenzo, K.A.: Building synthetic voices, http://festvox.org/festvox/festvox_toc.html
Muhr, R., Schrott, R.: Österreichisches Deutsch und andere nationale Varietäten plurizentrischer Sprachen in Europa. öbv&hpt, Wien (1997)
Moosmüller, S.: Die österreichische Variante der Standardaussprache. In: Morgan, E.M., Püschel, U. (eds.) Beiträge zur deutschen Standardaussprache, Werner Dausien, Hanau, Halle, pp. 204–214 (1996)
Fitt, S., Richmond, K.: Redundancy and productivity in the speech technology lexicon – can we do better? In: Proceedings of Interspeech (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Neubarth, F., Kranzler, C. (2009). A Distributional Concept for Modeling Dialectal Variation in TTS. In: Esposito, A., Hussain, A., Marinaro, M., Martone, R. (eds) Multimodal Signals: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5398. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00525-1_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00525-1_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00524-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00525-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)