[Lovisa W]

I was wondering about the syllable structure of the example word in the Week 3 lab – ‘caterpillar’. Is this done automatically or by hand? I am confused as to why the ‘p’ is part of the second syllable – normally I think it would be segmented as being the onset of the third syllable. Are there any situations which could arise where an incorrect or strange syllabification could cause problems in the synthesising of a word or sentence?

[Lovisa W]

Jurafsky and Martin writes that where homographs cannot be resolved by part of speech, they are simply ignored in TTS systems (page 291). However, would it not be possible to create rules which could solve such issues in most, or at least some, cases? For example, they talk about the word ‘bass’ which cannot be distinguished by to which word class it belongs. But, you could write a rule that says if the word is followed by the word ‘guitar’ it is the /b ey s/ pronounciation that should be used, and presumably there are some cases where there then would be no confusion as to which pronounciation to use. Does such a rule resolve too few cases for it to be worth including in the set of rules?

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