Text to speech technologies for mobile telephony services

Abstract

This project is concerned with the development of a Text to Speech (ITS) solution for mobile telephony services in the local context, where citizens share both Maltese and English as their primary languages. The input domain under focus is that of SMS messages and, while attention is given to input TTS issues tor Maltese, the influence of the second language is taken into consideration. In the general case, ITS systems aim to transform arbitrary textual input into spoken output by way of the automatic phonetization of the sentences to utter ([Dut97b ]). A secondary objective of the project is to explore Maltese prosody and try to combine previous linguistic research for the development of a framework for describing and assigning intonation and other prosodic features. Various acoustic, perceptual and linguistic frameworks have been explored for TIS systems ([BB92, FS91, SSOH96]) but there is still no universally accepted formalism. Linguistically motivated annotation based on Tones and Break Indices ([SBP+92, TBI]) is proposed as a viable formalism for TIS prosody assignment in Maltese, given previous relevant phonological studies ([Vel95, Vel03]). The area of TTS for Maltese has been little explored thus far. It is another objective of this project to aid further linguistic insight into the task, whilst bringing to bear other directly relevant computational linguistic research ([Cal04, Da102, Far99] amongst others). Advantage is also taken of other available resources ([FVA, FLT, FTS, PRT]) that support the development of TTS systems and linguistic research.