A look at the SRS synthesis rules for Japanese

SRS (Speech Research System), Hertz´s interactive synthesis rule development system [1], has been used recently to develop a set of phoneme-based rules for Japanese. This paper describes these rules, showing how they transform text through successive stages to produce natural-sounding Japanese utterances. Although the paper presents our overall synthesis strategy for Japanese, it leans quite heavily in its examples toward the description of our strategy for sentence prosody, this being an area where the lack of standard linguistic models has made our approach necessarily novel.