Text Normalization for Telugu Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Abstract

Most areas related to language and speech technology, directly or indirectly, require handling of unrestricted text, and Text-to-speech systems directly need to work on real text. To build a natural sounding speech synthesis system, it is essential that the text processing component produce an appropriate sequence of phonemic units corresponding to an arbitrary input text. A novel approach is used, where the input text is tokenized, and classification is done based on token type. The token sense disambiguation is achieved by the semantic nature of the language and then the expansion rules are applied to get the normalized text. However, for Telugu language not much work is done on text normalization. In this paper we discuss our efforts for designing a rule based system to achieve text normalization in the context of building Telugu text-to-speech system.