Text analysis for the Slovenian text-to-speech system

At the "Jozef Stefan" Institute a system called GOVOREC (SPEAKER) has been developed, which is capable of automatic conversion of any Slovenian text into speech. The different phases of the synthesis task are performed by several sequentially operating independent modules (text analysis, prosody generation and segmental concatenation), which are pipelined together. Each module is responsible for one portion of the problem of converting from text into speech. We use the phrase "text analysis" as a cover term for all of the computations involved in the first two modules of our synthesizer. That comprises such tasks as end-of-sentence detection, abbreviation and number expansion, special formats conversion, morphological analysis and phonological modeling, accentuation and phrasing. The paper describes the methods and techniques that are used in this process in more detail.