A Taiwanese text-to-speech system with applications to language learning

The paper describes a Taiwanese text-to-speech (TTS) system for Taiwanese language learning by using Taiwanese/Mandarin bilingual lexicon information. The TTS system is organized as three functional modules, which contain a text analysis module, a prosody module, and waveform synthesis modules. And then we set an experiment to evaluate the text analysis and tone-sandhi. An 89% labeling and 65% tone-sandhi accuracy rate can be achieved. With adopting proposed Taiwanese TTS component, talking electronic lexicon system, Taiwanese interactive spelling learning tool and Taiwanese TTS system can be built to help those who want to learn Taiwanese.