A text-to-speech translation system for Italian

Abstract

This paper describes a text-to-speech translation system for the Italian language. It is based on a formal translator which converts a graphemic text into the corresponding phonemic representation and on a suprasegmental features descriptor. The translator is implemented according to the formal techniques developed for lexical and syntactical analysis of artificial languages. The suprasegmental features descriptor determines pause positions, phoneme durations and pitch contour on the sole basis of the punctuation marks and the accent marks present in the text.