Constructing a Multilingual Phoneme List for Polyglot Speech Synthesiser

Presented in 2009 in the 4th Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics

In polyglot speech synthesis, resources are shared
across languages. The goal of this research is to develop global phoneme set using existing resources. We have selected 31 language databases out of the 72 diphone databases in MBROLA. By reusing existing resources, we would be able to gather global phoneme set in faster and wider language coverage. Therefore it would be able to be used for language that has limited linguistic expertise or limited linguistics resources. Our approach includes the process of extracting the phonemes of these languages, clustering, eliminating and substituting inaccurate phonemes and finally evaluating the list of phonemes obtained. At the
end of this study, we are able to come out with one complete list of a global phoneme set. This list can be use as a substitution for unavailable phonemes in future polyglot TTS systems. It is also suitable to be used as a default phoneme set for new languaes if the new languages’ phoneme set is not yet defined.