Name pronunciation in German text-to-speech synthesis

Abstract

We describe the name analysis and pronunciation component in the German version of the Bell Labs multilingual text-to-speech system. We concentrate on street names because they encompass interesting aspects of geographical and personal names. The system was implemented in the framework of finite-state transducer technology, using linguistic criteria as well as frequency distributions derived from a database. In evaluation experiments, we compared the performances of the general-purpose text analysis and the name-specific system on training and test materials. The name-specific system significantly outperforms the generic system. The error rates compare favorably with results reported in the research literature. Finally, we discuss areas for future work.