A generic algorithm for generating spoken monologues

The defining property of a Concept-to-Speech system is that it combines language and speech generation. Language generation converts the input concepts into natural language, which speech generation subsequently transforms into speech. Potentially, this leads to a more ‘natural sounding’ output than can be achieved in a plain Text-to-Speech system, since the correct placement of pitch accents and intonational boundaries —an important factor contributing to the ‘naturalness’ of the generated speech— is co-determined by syntactic and discourse information, which is typically available in the language generation module. In this paper, a generic algorithm for the generation of coherent spoken monologues is discussed, called D2S. Language generation is done by a module called LGM which is based on TAG-like syntactic structures with open slots, combined with conditions which determine when the syntactic structure can be used properly. A speech generation module (SGM) converts the output of the LGM into speech using either phrase-concatenation or diphone-synthesis.