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Unit selection module and method of chinese text-to-speech synthesis

  • US 7,574,360 B2
  • Filed: 07/22/2005
  • Issued: 08/11/2009
  • Est. Priority Date: 11/04/2004
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. A Chinese Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system comprising:

  • a computer system implementing a word pre-processing module configured to receive a text defining a Chinese sentence, a unit selection module, a speech generation module, an automatic speech unit-parsing module, and a speech output module; and

    a corpus stored in database accessible by said computer system;

    wherein said unit selection module comprises;

    a probabilistic context free grammar (PCFG) parser, a latent semantic indexing (LSI) module, and a modified variable-length unit selection scheme;

    said PCFG parser parses said Chinese sentence to obtain a context free grammar (CFG) of said Chinese sentence as its target unit;

    said automatic speech unit-parsing module automatically labels the location of nodes of every syllable of the Chinese sentence;

    said LSI module estimates the structural distance between the candidate synthesis units and the target unit in said corpus, and conducts a vectorization for estimating the structural distance, said vectorization transforming all the corpus words into ordered vectors and storing them in a CFG data matrix in the dimension of RxQ, wherein R stands for a number of grammar rules in a grammar G of the entire PCFG, and Q stands for the number of sentences in the corpus; and

    through said modified variable-length unit selection scheme, tagged with a dynamic program algorithm, the units are searched to find the best synthesis unit concatenation sequence of said Chinese sentence;

    wherein said speech output module is adapted to generate a synthesized speech output according to said concatenation sequence; and

    wherein a Chomsky Normal Form is used to simplify and describe the PCFG parser and to simplify the estimation of the structural distance.

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