Module 4 – speech synthesis – front end 2

Pronunciation, including letter-to-sound models, and predicting prosody. All these tasks can be done with Classification And Regression Trees (CARTs).
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Reading

Carr – English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction – Ch 5 – The Phonemic Principle

Takes you from phonetics (which is about sound) to phonology (which is about mental representation and organisation into categories).

Jurafsky & Martin – Section 3.1 – English Morphology

In speech technology for English, little or no use is made of morphology. But for other languages, it is essential.

Jurafsky & Martin (2nd ed) – Section 8.2 – Phonetic Analysis

Each word in the normalised text needs a pronunciation. Most words will be found in the dictionary, but for the remainder we must predict pronunciation from spelling.

Jurafsky & Martin (2nd ed) – Section 8.3 – Prosodic Analysis

Beyond getting the phones right, we also need to consider other aspects of speech such as intonation and pausing.

Cho & Ladefoged – Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages

Voice onset time (VOT) is known to vary with place of articulation.

Jurafsky & Martin – Section 3.2 – Finite-State Morphological Parsing

Automatic morphological decomposition of written words is possible. However, this section does not consider the added complication of deriving a pronunciation.

Jurafsky & Martin – Section 3.3 – Construction of a Finite-State Lexicon

A lexicon can be representing using different data structures (finite state network, tree, lookup table,...), depending on the application.

Peterson & Barney – Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels

Examines the production and perception of vowels. This is a classic paper that many other studies on have built on.