An efficient text analyzer with prosody generator-driven approach for Mandarin text-to-speech

A new approach for an efficient text analyzer is proposed. The prosody generator driven method is employed to design an efficient text analyzer for Mandarin text-to-speech synthesis. Three heuristic and theoretical methods are used to examine the capability of each linguistic feature. Firstly, the contribution of each linguistic feature on the prosody generator is examined experimentally. Secondly, the cross-influence of each linguistic feature on the prosody generator is analyzed. Thirdly, the problem of over- and under-classification on the linguistic feature is inspected. Finally, these three analytic results are referenced to design an efficient text analyzer. More than 39103 Chinese characters are employed to examine the performance of our text analyzer. Less than 78 ms is needed for word tagging under a P4 1.4 GHz PC. The correction rate with 97% is achieved. It confirms that the performance of our text analyzer is very good. Moreover, more natural and fluent speech is obtained under the lower computation.