Conventional methods of predicting phrase boundaries occasionally result in the output of text-to-speech conversion apparatus sounding unnatural. Text-t o- speech conversion apparatus described herein uses pattern-matching to predic t the position of phrase boundaries in its spoken output. The apparatus analys es text input to the apparatus to identify groups of words (known as 'chunks') which are unlikely to contain internal phrase boundaries. Both the chunks an d individual words are labelled with their syntactic characteristics. The apparatus has access to a database of sentences which also contains such syntactic labels, together with indications of where a human reader would insert minor and major phrase boundaries. The parts of the database which ha ve the most similar syntactic characteristics are found and phrase boundaries a re predicted based on the phrase boundaries found in those parts. Other characteristics are also used in the pattern-matching process.
SPEECH SYNTHESIS