The delta rule development system for speech synthesis from text

Progress in speech synthesis has been hampered by the lack of rule-writing tools of sufficient flexibility and power. This paper presents a new system, Delta, that gives linguists and programmers a versatile rule language and friendly debugging environment. Delta´s central data structure is well-suited for representing a broad class of multi-level utterance structures. The Delta language has flexible pattern-matching expressions, control structures, and utterance manipulation statements. Its dictionary facilities provide elegant exception handling. The interactive symbolic debugger speeds rule development and tuning. Delta can not only accommodate existing synthesis models, but can also be used to develop new ones.