TexAFon 2.0: A text processing tool for the generation of expressive speech in TTS applications

This paper presents TexAfon 2.0, an improved version of the text processing tool TexAFon, specially oriented to the generation of synthetic speech with expressive content. TexAFon is a text processing module in Catalan and Spanish for TTS systems, which performs all the typical tasks needed for the generation of synthetic speech from text: sentence detection, pre-processing, phonetic transcription, syllabication, prosodic segmentation and stress prediction. These improvements include a new normalisation module for the standardisation on chat text in Spanish, a module for the detection of the expressed emotions in the input text, and a module for the automatic detection of the intended speech acts, which are briefly described in the paper. The results of the evaluations carried out for each module are also presented.