Word syllabification in speech synthesis system

Abstract

The present invention relates to a system and method of word syllabification. The present invention receives a word to be syllabified and determines therefrom all possible substrings capable of forming part of the word. Sequences matching at least part of or the whole of the word are determined from the substrings together with respective probabilities of occurrence and the sequence having the greatest probability of occurrence is selected as being the most probable syllabification of the word. The most probable sequence can be determined in many different ways. For example, the sequence can be determined by commencing with the substring having the greatest probability of forming the beginning of a given word and subsequently traversing in a step-by-step manner a table comprising all possible substrings of the word and at each step selecting the next substring of the sequence according to which of the possible next substrings has the highest probability of occurrence. A further method of determining the most probable sequence would be to adopt the above step-by-step approach for all possible substrings capable of forming the beginning of the given word. Alternatively, all possible sequences of substring capable of constituting the word can be determined together respective probabilities of occurrence thereof and the sequence having the highest respective probability of occurrence is selected as being the most probable syllabification of the given word.