Archisegment-based letter-to-phone conversion for concatenative speech synthesis in Portuguese

A letter-to-phone conversion scheme is proposed for Portuguese which excludes representation of allophonic detail. Phonetically unstable segments are treated as archisegments, their articulatory weakness being analyzed in terms of feature underspecification. Besides solving classical problems of allophony and allomorphy, this analysis provides an efficient principle for building a unit inventory for concatenative speech synthesis.