Högskolan i Skövde

A text-to-speech system is a complex system consisting of several different modules such as grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, articulatory and prosodic modelling, voice modelling etc.

This dissertation is aimed at the creation of the initial part of a text-to-speech system, i.e. the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, designed for Swedish. The problem area at hand is the conversion of orthographic text into a phonetic representation that can be used as a basis for a future complete text-to speech system.

The central issue of the dissertation is the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and the elaboration of rules and algorithms required to achieve this task. The dissertation aims to prove that it is possible to make such a conversion by a rule-based algorithm with reasonable performance. Another goal is to find a way to represent phonotactic rules in a form suitable for parsing. It also aims to find and analyze problematic structures in written text compared to phonetic realization.

This work proposes a knowledge-based grapheme-to-phoneme conversion system for Swedish. The system suggested here is implemented, tested, evaluated and compared to other existing systems. The results achieved are promising, and show that the system is fast, with a high degree of accuracy.