MORPHON: Lexicon-based text-to-phoneme conversion and phonological rules

Abstract

In this contribution MORPHON is outlined. This module provides the text-to-speech System with phonological rules. It will be argued that such rules are needed because the pronunciation of a sentence does not consist of the concatenauon of the pronunciation of the constituting morphemes, but the pronunciation of morphemes is modified in certain contexts. These rules can only apply properly if exceptions can be listed in a lexicon, and if rules can refer to morphological and morpho-syntactic Information. Therefore a lexicon-based approach to text-tophoneme transcription conversion was chosen. Finally, the pronunciation accuracy of MORPHON is compared with that of two rule based text-to-phoneme transcription Systems.