Loquendo S.p.a.

Leonardo Badino

Claudia Barolo

Silvia Quazza

A text-to-speech system adapted to operate on text in a first language including sections in a second language, includes a grapheme/phoneme transcriptor for converting the sections in the second language into phonemes of the second language; a mapping module configured for mapping at least part of the phonemes of the second language onto sets of phonemes of the first language; and a speech-synthesis module adapted to be fed with a resulting stream of phonemes including the sets of phonemes of the first language resulting from mapping and the stream of phonemes of the first language representative of the text, and to generate a speech signal from the resulting stream of phonemes.

Text-to-speech method and system, computer program product therefor

Syntagms of a text including individual elements written without separators are segmented into chunks having strings including at least one individual element, such as an ideogram of the Mandarin Chinese language. A lexicon is defined including a set of strings, each string having at least one of the individual elements. The syntagm, being segmented, is orderly searched on an element-by-element basis by searching within the lexicon strings corresponding to any of the chunks. In the case of a positive search result, the corresponding chunk located is stored with an associated cost. A check is made as to whether the chunk located was already present in the lexicon. If the chunk located was already present, the cost associated therewith is reduced. A plurality of candidate segmentation sequences are thus generated, each corresponding to a respective segmentation pattern having associated a corresponding accrued cost. The candidate sequence having the lowest associated cost is selected as the final result of segmentation.

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Turin, Italy

Leonardo Badino