A Flexible Rule Compiler for Speech Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a versatile rule compiler for text-to-speech systems that transforms rules into deterministic finite-state transducers, enabling efficient and flexible speech synthesis processing.

Contribution

It presents a novel rule compiler that produces deterministic FSTs from parameterized rules, improving flexibility and efficiency in speech synthesis.

Findings

Transducer guarantees function realization, enabling deterministic implementation

Supports parameterized input/output for diverse string and feature-structure processing

Enhances flexibility and efficiency in TTS rule application

Abstract

We present a flexible rule compiler developed for a text-to-speech (TTS) system. The compiler converts a set of rules into a finite-state transducer (FST). The input and output of the FST are subject to parameterization, so that the system can be applied to strings and sequences of feature-structures. The resulting transducer is guaranteed to realize a function (as opposed to a relation), and therefore can be implemented as a deterministic device (either a deterministic FST or a bimachine).