VieCtoS
Phonology-Acoustics Mapping for Concept-to-Speech

In this nationally sponsored project (Austrian Science Foundation), a prototype of a concept-to-speech system was developed able to produce German utterances from a symbolic representation that contains word-specific information (phonemes, word accent, syllable structure) as well as abstract prosodic information. The representation is based on the autosegmental phonologic theory of Pierrehumbert which can be considered a de-facto standard of prosodic notation. The project focussed on developing a mapping from this symbolic description of prosody to the corresponding phonetic/acoustic parameter values (fundamental frequency, duration, intensity). An algorithm for realizing this mapping was developed and implemented. The description arrived at forms the input for a parametrizable synthesizer. The synthesizer used in the project is based on an adaptation of a demi-syllable synthesizer developed at the Institute für Nachrichtentechnik und Hochfrequenztechnik at the Vienna University of Technology.

Publications

Kai Alter, Ernst Buchberger, Johannes Matiasek, Georg Niklfeld, and Harald Trost: VIECTOS: The Vienna Concept-to-Speech System. Gibbon, D. (ed.): Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. 1996

Research staff

• Kai Alter
• Ernst Buchberger
• Georg Niklfeld
• Hannes Pirker
• Erhard Rank
• Harald Trost

Partners

• Institute für Nachrichtentechnik und Hochfrequenztechnik (TU Wien)

Sponsor