Homograph ambiguity resolution in front-end design for portuguese TTS systems

Braga, Daniela; Coelho, Luis; Resende Jr., Fernando Gil V.

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/7628

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Authors

Braga, Daniela

Coelho, Luis

Resende Jr., Fernando Gil V.

Abstract(s)

In this paper, a module for homograph disambiguation in Portuguese Text-to-Speech (TTS) is proposed. This module works with a part-of-speech (POS) parser, used to disambiguate homographs that belong to different parts-of-speech, and a semantic analyzer, used to disambiguate homographs which belong to the same part-of-speech. The proposed algorithms are meant to solve a significant part of homograph ambiguity in European Portuguese (EP) (106 homograph pairs so far). This system is ready to be integrated in a Letter-to-Sound (LTS) converter. The algorithms were trained and tested with different corpora. The obtained experimental results gave rise to 97.8% of accuracy rate. This methodology is also valid for Brazilian Portuguese (BP), since 95 homographs pairs are exactly the same as in EP. A comparison with a probabilistic approach was also done and results were discussed.