ANNOTATING PHONEMES AND ACCENTS FOR TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYSTEM

• US 20100030561A1
• Filed: 08/03/2009
• Published: 02/04/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 07/12/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cerence Operating Company (Cerence Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Mori, Shinsuke, Nagano, Toru, Nishimura, Masafumi
• Granted Patent: US 8,751,235 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/04 Details of speech synthesis systems, e.g. synthesiser structure or memory management
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/08 Text analysis or generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text, e.g. grapheme to phoneme translation, prosody generation or stress or intonation determination
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/086 Detection of language
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/10 Prosody rules derived from text; Stress or intonation

Abstract

A system that outputs phonemes and accents of texts. The system has a storage section storing a first corpus in which spellings, phonemes, and accents of a text input beforehand are recorded separately for individual segmentations of the words that are contained in the text. A text for which phonemes and accents are to be output is acquired and the first corpus is searched to retrieve at least one set of spellings that match the spellings in the text from among sets of contiguous spellings. Then, the combination of a phoneme and an accent that has a higher probability of occurrence in the first corpus than a predetermined reference probability is selected as the phonemes and accent of the text.

Claims

1. A method of controlling a system to output phonemes and accents corresponding to an input text, the system comprising a computer storage medium storing a corpus comprising a plurality of stored texts and a plurality of spellings, each of the plurality of spellings corresponding to one of the plurality of stored texts and having associated phonemes and accents, the method comprising:

acquiring the input text, the input text comprising a contiguous sequence of characters representing a plurality of words;

retrieving from the corpus at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings that each corresponds to the same contiguous sequence of characters in the input text and that each is associated with a different combination of phonemes and accents; and

selecting a selected combination of phonemes and accents from among the combinations of phonemes and accents corresponding to the retrieved at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings, wherein the selected combination has a higher probability of occurrence in the corpus than a predetermined reference probability.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the input text and the plurality of stored texts are in a language in which word boundaries are not explicitly indicated.

3. A computer system, the computer system comprising:

a computer storage medium storing a corpus comprising a plurality of stored texts and a plurality of spellings, each of the plurality of spellings corresponding to one of the plurality of stored texts and having associated phonemes and accents; and

at least one processor, programmed to;

acquire an input text, the input text comprising a contiguous sequence of characters representing a plurality of words;

retrieve from the corpus at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings that each corresponds to the same contiguous sequence of characters in the input text and that each is associated with a different combination of phonemes and accents; and

select a selected combination of phonemes and accents from among the combinations of phonemes and accents corresponding to the retrieved at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings, wherein the selected combination has a higher probability of occurrence in the corpus than a predetermined reference probability.

4. The computer system of claim 3, wherein the input text and the plurality of stored texts are in a language in which word boundaries are not explicitly indicated.

5. A computer-readable storage medium encoded with computer code for execution on at least one processor in a system, the system comprising a computer storage medium storing a corpus comprising a plurality of stored texts and a plurality of spellings, each of the plurality of spellings corresponding to one of the plurality of stored texts and having associated phonemes and accents, the computer code, when executed on the at least one processor, performing a method of controlling the system to output phonemes and accents corresponding to an input text, the method comprising acts of:

acquiring the input text, the input text comprising a contiguous sequence of characters representing a plurality of words;

retrieving from the corpus at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings that each corresponds to the same contiguous sequence of characters in the input text and that each is associated with a different combination of phonemes and accents; and

selecting a selected combination of phonemes and accents from among the combinations of phonemes and accents corresponding to the retrieved at least one set of two or more of the plurality of spellings, wherein the selected combination has a higher probability of occurrence in the corpus than a predetermined reference probability.

6. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 5, wherein the input text and the plurality of stored texts are in a language in which word boundaries are not explicitly indicated.