Syllabification for Afrikaans speech synthesis

Abstract

This paper describes the continuing development of a pronunciation resource for speech synthesis of Afrikaans by augmenting an existing pronunciation dictionary to include syllable boundaries and stress. Furthermore, different approaches for grapheme to phoneme conversion and syllabification derived from the dictionary are evaluated. Cross-validation experiments suggest that joint sequence models are effective at directly modelling pronunciations including syllable boundaries. Finally, some informal observations and demonstrations are presented regarding the integration of this work into a typical text-to-speech system.