Statistically augmented preprocessing/normalization module for a Romanian text-to-speech system

This paper addresses issues regarding the interdependence between sentence boundary detection (SBD), proper name detection (PND) and acronym/abbreviation detection (ABD) from the perspective of a preprocessing/ normalization module implementation as a first level in a Romanian text-to-speech (TTS) system. All these tasks have a major contribution to the intelligibility and naturalness of a synthesized text. Moreover, Romanian is still a scarce resource language and building algorithms for the automatic extraction of acronym/abbreviation and proper names from large text corpora helps obtaining more comprehensive resources for the TTS language processing stage. The paper proposes an improved preprocessing/normalization module for a high quality Romanian TTS system mainly by solving in a unified manner a number of difficult situations at the preprocessing level.