Stress assignment in letter to sound rules for speech synthesis

This paper will discuss how to determine word stress from spelling. Stress assignment is a well-established weak point for many speech synthesizers because stress dependencies cannot be determined locally, by looking through a five or six character window, as many speech synthesizers do. Examples such as degráde / dègradátion and télegraph / telégraphy demonstrate that stress dependencies can span over two and three syllables. Etymology is an even more striking problem for local determination of stress. Consider cálculi / tortóni which should have the same stress pattern since they have the same sequence of stops, liquids and vowels. However, tortóni violates the English main stress rule (which is derived from Latin) and takes penultimate stress like most other Italian loan words: Aldrighetti, Angeletti, Bellotti Iannucci, Italiano, Lombardino, Marconi, Morillo, Olivetti. Stressing Italian names with the Latin pattern yields amusing results as will be demonstrated.