TR-IT-0243 :November, 1997

Ming Yue Xie-Zhang

Chinese Speech Synthesis within CHATR

Abstract:This report describes my work of six months on Chinese speech synthesis within CHATR at ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories (ITL). It contains the following chapters: Chapter 2 gives a brief introduction to Chinese language. Chapter 3 describes the Chinese speech database and the work involved in creating a CHATR Chinese database. Chapter 4 presents the problems encountered in Chinese synthesis and the solutions to them. In this chapter, I also explain the changes which had been made to the CHATR source code in order to achieve a better result on the segmental level. Chapter 5 describes my work on automatic conversion from Chinese orthography to Chinese phonetic symbols (Pin-yin) using a lexicon. Chapter 6 discusses some remaining problems and the future work for Chinese synthesis.