Nettalk: a Parallel Network That Learns to Read Aloud

Unrestricted English text can be converted to speech by applying phonological rules and handling exceptions with a look-up table. However, this approach is highly labor intensive since each entry and rule must be hand-crafted. NETtalk is an alternative approach that is based on an automated learning procedure for a parallel network of deterministic processing units. ~ f t e r ' training on a corpus of informal continuous speech, it achieves good performance and generalizes to novel words. The distributed internal representations of the phonological regularities discovered by the network are damage resistant.