A speech synthesis system by rule in Japanese

要旨

In Japanese, text-to-speech systems have to deal with problems of complicated orthography and a writing custom without a clear word separation rule. The system shown here is a tentative one avoiding such troublesome problems, constructed to study the rules in Japanese that are useful for the speech synthesis. In order to obtain natural prosody, as in human text reading, the system should have some mechanism that divides the input sentence into several proper breath groups with pauses based on the analysis of the syntactic structure as a human does. The construction of the system has been accomplished, and it can respond to such a demand. This algorithm was realized as completed software on 2HD diskette, available for the PC-98 series of personal computer made by NEC. The features of the system are as follows. The input form is word units written in kana letter codes. These units are separated with the space code. No prosody code is necessary except for the punctuation marks. An original parser, based on traditional Japanese grammar, produces the prosody for the synthesized speech.

主題