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Considerations on using PLS for Slovenian Pronunciation Lexicon Construction

Internationalizing W3C's Speech Synthesis Markup Language, Workshop II, Heraklion, Crete, May 2006. Considerations on using PLS for Slovenian Pronunciation Lexicon Construction Jerneja Ž ganec Gros Alpineon d.o.o. , Ljubljana, Slovenia jerneja.gros@alpineon.com.

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Considerations on using PLS for Slovenian Pronunciation Lexicon Construction

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  1. Internationalizing W3C's Speech Synthesis Markup Language, Workshop II, Heraklion, Crete, May 2006 • Considerations on using PLS for Slovenian Pronunciation Lexicon Construction • Jerneja Žganec Gros • Alpineond.o.o., Ljubljana, Slovenia • jerneja.gros@alpineon.com

  2. Presentation outline • Introduction • SI-PRONlexicon: • word list • lexicon format • phonetic transcription • morpho-syntactic descriptions • Proposed extensions to PLS, SSML • Conclusions

  3. Introduction • Speech technology applications: • automatic speech recognition (ASR) • text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) • require consistent specification of pronunciation • Slovenian: lexical stress position not fixed -> pron lex crucial • Pronunciation lexicons: • general • application-specific • word/phrase pronunciations • application-specific proper nouns: personal&location names

  4. Slovenian pron lex • General: • S5 (Gros et al., 1996) • Onomastica (Derlić and Kačič, 1997) • SImlex/SIflex (Verdonik et al, 2002) • SI-LC-STAR (Verdonik and Rojc, 2004) • AlpSynth (Gros et al., 2002) • SI-BN (Žibert, 2005, Žgank; 2005) • Application-specific: • Gopolis, SpeechDAT, etc

  5. Word-list • SI-PRON wordlist: (a) 93,154 lemmas from SSKJ (b) over 1,000,000 word form derived from (a) – morphol. deriv. (c) additional word list: • corpus-based search • 20,000 most freq inflected word forms not covered by SSKJ lemmas (d) collocations, multi-word expressions SSKJ: Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika

  6. Phonetic transcriptions • SSKJ lemmas: • automatic derivation, based on dynamic/tonemic accent information • manual corrections for about 2.500 lemmas (words of foreign origin) • Word forms derived from SSKJ: • automatic: SSKJ lemma pronunciation look-up, inflectional paradigms • Additional corpus-based word list: • automatic lexical stress assignment • AlpSynth grapheme-to-phoneme rule set

  7. GTP rules • 193 context-dependent grapheme-to-phoneme rules: Left Grapheme Right Phonetic Example Rule explanation context string context transcr. $ er _ [@r] Gaber @ occurs before each -r not followed by a vowel (T opori sic 91, p.49) = m f [F] Simfonija <m> in front of <f> and <v> is pronounced as a labiodental (Pravopis90, p. 145)

  8. Transcription accuracy experiment • reference: hand-crafted pron lex, 30K lexemes • automatic lexical stress assignment: 25% error rate • lexical stress & o/e pronunciation known in advance: • transcription success rate 99.01 % (0.6% handcrafting errors) • conclusion: • for semi-automatic derivation of Slovenian phonetic transcriptions with a 0.03% error rate only lexical stress positions&e/o need to be manually validated

  9. SI-PRON format • LC-STAR lexicon specs – STTS (Shamas & v Heuvel, 2004) • Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) • W3C Voice Browser Activity • Pronunciation lexicon markup language • Version 1.0, W3C Last Call Working Draft 31 January 2006 • http://www.w3.org/TR/pronunciation-lexicon/ • Two main applications: • Speech Synthesis (SSML documents) • PLS improves SSML on text normalization, GTP • Speech Recognition (SRGS grammars) • W3C standard! recommendation

  10. PLS in SSML • SSML document references an external pron lexicon: • TTS engine loads the PLS documents and applies them to the SSML document • applications may specify contextual PLS documents, which are to be used in different points of the interaction (like airports.pls, carriers.pls, …) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <speak version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis" xml:lang="SI"> <lexicon uri="http://www.alpineon.com/airports.pls"/> Letalo letalske družbe British Airlines, ki prihaja iz Manchestra, bo imelo 5 minut zamude. </speak>

  11. Phonetic alphabet • SI-SAMPA (Zemljak et al., 2002) • Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet • only ASCII characters, not the IPA extended char set • augmented with additional markers for tonemic accents (tonemic acute&tonemic circumflex), lexical stress accents (acute, circumflex&grave)

  12. PLS • The <lexeme> element - container of a lexicon entry: • usually only one<grapheme> element • several<phoneme>or <alias>elements <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF - 8"?> <lexicon version="1.0" xml:lang="si - SI" alphabet="x - sampa - SI - reduced"> <lexeme> <grapheme>dober</grapheme> <phoneme>"d/o: - b@r</phoneme> <! -- This is an example of the x - samp a - SI - reduced string for the pronunciation of the Slovenian word: "dober", meaning "good" in English -- > </lexeme> </lexicon>

  13. Pronunciation variations • multiple pronunciations: • several<phoneme> elements • preferred pronunciation: • indicated by the prefer element • usually the 1st pronunciation from the SSKJ • for some words, 2 pronunciations are equally preferred EXAMPLE: - male Slovenian nouns, terminating with "ilec" like /borilec/, /darovalec/ • "iUts"/"ilts", "ilts"/"iUts", "ilts", or "iUts" • typically account for more fluent"iUts" or overarticulated"ilts"pronunciation

  14. Extensions… • proposed extension: • a new optional attribute for the <phoneme> element: • pron-styleattribute • values: "fluent", "overarticulated" • pron-stylealso for other elements: • <voice>, <speak>, <p>, <s> • another optional attribute for the above elements: emotionfor expressive TTS ?

  15. Extensions… • dialects: • user-friendly apps require dialect/sociolect pronunciation variations • another optional attribute for the following elements: <phoneme>, <voice>, <speak>, <p>, <s> - rfc3066-like identifiers may be used to indicate dialects

  16. Extensions… • source/creator: • only the <metadata>element • source of multiple pronunciations: • useful info when merging multiple PLS dox • some sources/creators may be more reliable than others… - additional optional attribute pron-sourcefor the <phoneme>element

  17. Extensions… • part-of-speech tags: • Slovenian language – complex inflectional paradigm • including "dual" – like ancient Greek! • morphological, syntactic and semantion descriptors welcome in future revisions of the PLS document • proprietary <lemma>, <MSD> elements used in SI-PRON • MULTEXT-East MSDs (Erjavec, 2004)

  18. Conclusion • SI-PRON pronunciation lexicon for Slovenian • proposed extensions to PLS, SSML • pron-styleattribute  • emotionattribute • annotating dialects/sociolects • source/creatorattribute  • morpho-syntactic, semantic descriptors 

  19. Project Partners • L6-5405 project • Research of Slovenian Language in Lexicography and Lexicology based on Digital Language Resources • Spoken representation of Slovenian words: • http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/sskj.html • Alpineon • ZRC-SAZU • Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language

  20. SSKJ speech files

  21. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

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