Name pronunciation in German text-to-speech synthesis

We describe the name analysis and pronunciation component in the German version of the Bell Labs multilingual text-tospeech system. We concentrate on street names because they encompass interesting aspects of geographical and personal names. The system was implemented in the framework of finite-state transducer technology, using linguistic criteria as well as frequency distributions derived from a database. In evaluation experiments, we compared the performances of the generalpurpose text analysis and the name-specific system on training and test materials. The name-specific system significantly outperforms the generic system. The error rates compare favorably with results reported in the research literature. Finally, we discuss areas for future work.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ANLP
• Authors: Stefanie Jannedy, Bernd Möbius
• Keywords: ANLP 1997, Finite-state Transducer Technology, Generalpurpose Text Analysis, Multilingual Text-tospeech System