From diphones to allophones: from data to rules

A research project is presented in which we aim to design a speech synthesis model based on both the diphone and the allophone concepts, i.e. the data-driven and rule-driven approach for speech synthesis, respectively. At present, diphone concatenation for Dutch Ieads to more intelligible speech than when a rule-based allophone synthesis is applied, although the latter synthesis has the theoretical advantage of optimal parametric freedom. However, in rule-based speech synthesis the iterative adjustment of the relevant speech parameterB appears to be rather laborious. Therefore, an attempt is made to extract information about rules for allophone synthesis from the da ta-driven diphone synthesis ( datato-rule converBion) by means of a semi-automatic algorithm.