Design and evaluation of a phonological phrase parser for Spanish text-to-speech

The paper presents and evaluates a phonological phrase parser for a Spanish text to speech system. The parser consists of three stages: 1) lexical lookup, using a small dictionary (428 words); 2) preliminary phrase boundary placement, using a modification of M.Y. Liberman and K.W. Church´s (1992) function group parser; and 3) readjustment of phrase boundaries, using syllable count and punctuation. A corpus of 382 hand parsed sentences (1691 phrases) was used to evaluate the parser. The parser generated almost the same number of phrases (1692) as the hand parsed sentences with 70% (1186) agreement. Suggestions for improving the parser´s performance include the expansion of the verb lexicon performing simple morphological analysis for verbs, and relaxing the syllable count in phrases before verb forms